Re: Hugepages demand paging V2 [0/8]: Discussion and overview

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 06:26:42PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>>> - Clearing hugetlb pages is time consuming using clear_highpage in
>>> alloc_huge_page. Make it possible to use hw assist via DMA or so there?

On Monday, October 25, 2004 7:23 pm, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> It's possible, but it's been found not to be useful. What has been found
>> useful is assistance from much lower-level memory hardware of a kind
>> not to be had in any extant mass-manufactured machines.

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 07:40:30PM -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> Do you have examples?  SGI hardware has a so-called 'BTE' (for Block Transfer 
> Engine) that can arbitrarily zero or copy pages w/o CPU assistance.  It's 
> builtin to the memory controller.  Using it to zero the pages has the 
> advantages of being asyncrhonous and not hosing the CPU cache.

That's the same kind of thing, so it apparently has been
mass-manufactured.


-- wli