In big memory machines, hugepages can play a large role in increasing system performance. However, using hugepages manually for different segments of memory adds to application complexity. Linux has a mechanism for automatically backing some memory areas with hugepages, called Transparent Huge Pages (THP). In the current state, THP is quite limited and can only collapse normal pages with a hugepage of one particular size, which is the "default" hugepage size for the system. Such a design is quite limiting for architectures which supported a wide variety of page sizes, ranging from 64KB, all the way to 1TB. In this presentation, Nitin Gupta will discuss ideas for extending THP to support many different page sizes for architectures that support them, along with some performance numbers from initial prototype work.
