yeah, most likely. (It's possible technically even on a native kernel -
just very expensive to various aspects of the kernel.)
yeah - it's actually the way how hugetlb should be done. Plus expand
gbpages to hugetlbfs and hotplug memory on Barcelona CPUs and you can do
user-space apps that can run for a long time without any TLB misses.
_That_ might make sense to explore in practice. (i'm not holding my
breath though, TLB misses are _fast_ on the best x86 CPUs.)
But we wont be able to make such experiments without having the
capability on x86. So i'd like to break the catch-22 by accepting all
this into arch/x86, it certainly is simple and makes some sense, it's
just that i'm not that convinced about it personally at the moment.
So feel free to turn it all into a killer feature (make hugetlb backed
memory transparent to user-space, etc. etc.) that high-performance
computing users strive for and all that will change. Please send the
reshaped patches so we can move past the 'what if' discussion phase ;-)
Ingo
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