On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:59:15AM -0800, Matt Thomas wrote: > Why would anyone want this? Say you have a system in which the MMU can have > per translation table page sizes. a 16KB page size might be desirable for the > kernel and for LP64 processes. If you are running a ILP32 process, possibly > of an older architecture, you might want to use a 4KB page size.
I guess another usage is a (huge) framebuffer/aperture mmap'd by the userland driver, where you could easily save a lot TLB entries by using 1 MB pages (or bigger) instead of 4/8k ones. I think Solaris does this. Martin