Re: Getting big areas of memory, in 2.3.x?

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Fri, 10 Dec 1999 00:37:55 +0000 (GMT)


> Then too, there is the matter of TLB misses for applications which
> visit a lot of data, especially on processors with reasonably large
> caches. With 4 KB pages and 64 TLB entries, the TLB cannot map all of
> a cache larger than 256 KB. If the cache is, say, 2 MB and the
> application cycles through many of the pages in the cache in a loop,
> you can wind up with a TLB miss for almost every load (other than those from
> the stack). With 1 MB pages, there are almost no TLB misses.

With very large amounts of memory I don't doubt this. X86 is alas crippled
with a choice of 4K, 2Mb or 4Mb pages.

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