Strange problem with 8-stable, VMWare vSphere 4 & AMD CPUs (unexpected shutdowns)

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 10 February 2010 1:38:37 pm Ivan Voras wrote:
> On 10 February 2010 19:35, Andriy Gapon <avg at icyb.net.ua> wrote:
> > on 10/02/2010 20:26 Ivan Voras said the following:
> >> On 10 February 2010 19:10, Andriy Gapon <avg at icyb.net.ua> wrote:
> >>> on 10/02/2010 20:03 Ivan Voras said the following:
> >>>> When you say "very unique" is it in the "it is not Linux or Windows"
> >>>> sense or do we do something nonstandard?
> >>> The former - neither Linux, Windows or OpenSolaris seem to have what we 
have.
> >>
> >> I can't find the exact documents but I think both Windows
> >> MegaUltimateServer (the highest priced version of Windows Server,
> >> whatever it's called today) and Linux (though disabled and marked
> >> Experimental) have it, or have some kind of support for large pages
> >> that might not be as pervasive (maybe they use it for kernel only?). I
> >> have no idea about (Open)Solaris.
> >
> > I haven't said that those OSes do not use large pages.
> > I've said what I've said :-)
> 
> Ok :)
> 
> Is there a difference between "large pages" as they are commonly known
> and "superpages" as in FreeBSD ? In other words - are you referencing
> some specific mechanism, like automatic promotion / demotion of the
> large pages or maybe something else?

Yes, the automatic promotion / demotion.  That is a far-less common feature.  
FreeBSD/i386 has used large pages for the kernel text as far back as at least 
4.x, but that is not the same as superpages.  Linux does not have automatic 
promotion / demotion to my knowledge.  I do not know about other OS's.

-- 
John Baldwin