Thinking about A New Mechanism for Huge Page Management

Abstract

The Huge page mechanism is proposed to reduce the TLB misses and benefit the overall system performance. On the system with large memory capacity, using huge pages is an ideal choice to alleviate the virtual-to-physical address translation overheads. However, using huge pages might incur expensive memory compaction operations due to memory fragmentation problem, and lead to memory bloating as many huge pages are often underutilized in practice.