I only mentioned st as example of the inability to get a large page
long after system startup. Large pages are good for a variety of purposes.
For example, large pages for programs with large code or data footprints
can dramatically reduce TLB misses. If the I/O system learns to do direct
I/O, the overhead of setting up large I/O operations, whether for disk I/O
or for OpenGL operations such as writing a large image to the screen
(via DMA), is much reduced when the I/O is done from large pages.
The CPU overhead of setting up I/O operations is pretty minimal when you
are doing file I/O to and from a single IDE disk, but far from minimal
for higher-bandwidth targets, such as a graphics controller or a
HDTV camera.
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