Gentoo Archives: gentoo-amd64

From: "John S. Yates
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Cc: Gentoo <gentoo-amd64@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] TLB Size
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 13:03:24
Message-Id: dq7m62tv0eovvv0q2irf4keh4oh96rr0j6@4ax.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-amd64] TLB Size by "Ryan A. Rice"
1 >Does anyone know how to change the TLB size?
2
3 Once you wade through all of the smart-ass replies
4 let me mention the following.
5
6 While the "size" of the TLB measured in number of
7 TLB-entries is cast in silicon, nearly all modern
8 CPU architectures (including the amd64/x86_64) have
9 scheme for increasing the effective capacity of the
10 TLB measured as the total amount of virtual address
11 space that can be mapped. This is because modern
12 TLB designs allow TLB entries to map varying size
13 windows of virtual address space.
14
15 The problem here is one of OS software. The size
16 of the window mapped by a TLB entry is intimately
17 related to the software's page size. The Linux
18 kernel is just now beginning to add support for page
19 sizes larger than 4K. This is turn ripples back
20 into file system design, free space management, etc.
21 Think pages sizes of 64KB or 1MB. IBM has announced
22 PPC support for 1GB TLB mappings! Such architectural
23 features are designed to support VERY large systems
24 with lots of memory working with VERY large datasets.
25
26 Anyway, it is going to be a while before such support
27 is available from a conservative release like Gentoo.
28
29 /john
30
31
32 --
33 gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list