Yes, and Linux. at least historically, has not used them without explicit program opt-in. Often advice is to disable transparent huge pages for performance reasons. Not sure about other operating systems.
x86 has decades of knowhow and a zillion transistors to spend on making the memory pipeline, TLB caching & prefetching etc. etc. really really good. They work as well as they do despite the 4k base page size, not because of it.
If you'd start from a clean sheet today you'd probably end up with a somewhat bigger base page size. Not hugely larger though, as that wastes a lot of memory for most applications. Maybe 16k like some ARM chips use?
Hmm? x86 has supported much larger “huge” page sizes for ages.
Yes, and Linux. at least historically, has not used them without explicit program opt-in. Often advice is to disable transparent huge pages for performance reasons. Not sure about other operating systems.
See, for example, https://www.pingcap.com/blog/transparent-huge-pages-why-we-d...
Huh, no? The usual advice is to enable THPs for performance, you only disable them in specific scenarios.
x86 has decades of knowhow and a zillion transistors to spend on making the memory pipeline, TLB caching & prefetching etc. etc. really really good. They work as well as they do despite the 4k base page size, not because of it.
If you'd start from a clean sheet today you'd probably end up with a somewhat bigger base page size. Not hugely larger though, as that wastes a lot of memory for most applications. Maybe 16k like some ARM chips use?