Reducing page structures for huge pages

Kernel development is a constant exercise in reducing overhead; any resources taken by the kernel are not available for the workload that users actually want to run. As part of this, the page structure used to manage memory has been kept as small as possible. Even so, page structures typically take up just over 1.5% of the available memory, which is too much for some users. LWN recently looked at DMEMFS as one approach to reduce this overhead, but that is not the only work happening in this area. Two developers are currently working independently on patches to reduce the overhead associated with huge pages in particular.

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