Re: [PATCH] arm64: Enable CONFIG_COMPAT also for 64k page size

From: Catalin Marinas
Date: Fri Dec 05 2014 - 07:31:35 EST


On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 12:24:49PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday 05 December 2014 11:05:07 Catalin Marinas wrote:
> >
> > > Should we add support for 64k-pages in the arm32 kernel as well now?
> >
> > 32-bit LPAE doesn't support 64K pages but IIRC the classic MMU does
> > (though I have to check whether it was optional). But it's not feasible
> > to enable this in a 32-bit environment because of the memory wasted with
> > large pages (on average 32KB per mapped file, possibly even more if you
> > have lots of small files).
>
> That sounds like a tradeoff that some users might be willing to make.
>
> I remember that with ps3-linux, a lot of people wanted to enable 64k-pages
> because the Cell processor has such a small number of TLB entries (256 or
> 1024), but Linux only has around 200MB of memory available. I believe
> there are arm32 machines with more RAM and fewer TLBs.

I've heard that the WD MyCloud NAS (Cortex-A9 based) moved to 64K pages
and they rebuilt the filesystem (which annoyed some people that were
previously installing Debian packages directly, they now need
recompilation).

--
Catalin
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