mmap performance and memory use

[Ivan Voras]

On 07/10/2011 19:13, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Kostik Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com>wrote:

>> For one thing, this indeed causes more memory use for the OS. This is
>> somewhat mitigated by automatic use of superpages. Superpage promotion
>> still keeps the 4KB page table around, so most savings from the
>> superpages are due to more efficient use of TLB.
>>
>>
> You are correct about the page table page.  However, a superpage mapping
> consumes a single PV entry, in place of 512 or 1024 PV entries.  This winds
> up saving about three physical pages worth of memory for every superpage
> mapping.

But wouldn't the "conservative" superpages policy make it difficult in
the OPs case to ever get promotions to superpages if he's touching pages
almost randomly?

> Similarly, mmap(..., MAP_PREFAULT_READ) on a large, memory resident file may pre-map the file using superpage mappings. 

grep doesn't find this symbol in the sys src tree in 8-STABLE - nor it
seems in /usr/include.

But anyway, is there a mechanism which gives more guarantees than "may"
(i.e. which forces this) - or if not, how hard would it be to add one?
Some Linux-based "enterprise" software (including Java) use
Linux-specific calls to allocate large pages directly.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/attachments/20111011/125d39ad/signature.pgp