>>>>> "Yann" == Yann Sionneau <[email protected]> writes:

> Le 10/07/12 16:51, David Kuehling a écrit :
>>>>>>> "Werner" == Werner Almesberger <[email protected]> writes:
>> 
>>> Yann Sionneau wrote:
>>>> *TLB size : 1024 entries
>> 
>>> 1024+1024 is pretty big. I found Longsoon 2E has 16+64 [1], Itanic
>>> has 96+128, PowerPC 405 has 64 (unified ?) [3], only Intel i7 comes
>>> somewhat close with 576 entries per core. [4]
>> 
>> Note that Loongson has 16kB pages (per default under Linux, AFAIR).
>> Any reason we stick to 4kB pages?

> Milkymist One board has 128 MB of DDR400 SDRAM.  Which means 32768
> pages (if page size is 4 kB).  I don't know the advantages of having
> big pages but I guess it's better for fragmentation to have smaller
> pages since it allows to have smaller slices.

[..]

> managing 4 kB pages for M1 costs us : 40 * 32768 = 1.24 MB

> What are other advantages in using 16 kB pages ?

I think RAM usage for the page tables is insignificant.  Smaller pages
increase the TLB miss rate (or larger pages allow you to reduce TLB
size, see how Loongson only has a relatively small TLB).  TLB misses
look pretty expensive as they need an interrupt to be processed
(i.e. much more expensive than a cache miss).

Larger pages cost some RAM that is lost due to granularity of
allocations, but as I said, M1 has quite a lot of RAM (when compared to,
say the Nanonote).  RAM loss should be proportional to the number of
processes plus number of mapped shared libraries.  Maybe a fully booted
Linux system would lose some 100*8k RAM with 16k pages (compared to some
100*2k with 4k pages).

cheers,

David
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