Hello,
I'm resending this series to try and provoke some discussion.
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The following patches bring both HugeTLB support and Transparent HugePage (THP) support to ARM for 2 levels of paging (i.e. without LPAE).
This code has been tested on an Arndale board (Exynos 5250), and is based on 3.11-rc1, with the hugepage simplification patch: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2013-July/184117.html
HugeTLB and THP support for LPAE has already been merged in 3.11-rc1.
Hugepages can give nice performance boosts to workloads that put pressure on the TLBs. I've observed uplifts of ~5% to some tasks just by enabling hugepages via the libhugetlbfs tools. Other people have observed decent performance boosts when huge pages are enabled: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2013-February/148835.h...
I would appreciate any discussion on these patches, as there are people who have an interest in having huge page support in non-LPAE kernels.
Cheers,