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Comment by devit

Seems pretty dubious to do this without adding support for having both 4KB and 16KB processes at once to the Linux kernel, since it means all old binaries break and emulators which emulate normal systems with 4KB pages (Wine, console emulators, etc.) might dramatically lose performance if they need to emulate the MMU.

Hopefully they don't actually ship a 16KB default before supporting 4KB pages as well in the same kernel.

Also it would probably be reasonable, along with making the Linux kernel change, to design CPUs where you can configure a 16KB pagetable entry to map at 4KB granularity and pagefault after the first 4KB or 8KB (requires 3 extra bits per PTE or 2 if coalesced with the invalid bit), so that memory can be saved by allocating 4KB/8KB pages when 16KB would have wasted padding.

parent devit 2 years ago

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