malloc - cache locality - TLB

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 05:09:15PM +0100, Ondřej Bílka wrote:
> As linux supported since 2003 huge pages we could try to use these.

Transparentt huge pages are the only sane way to use them, and they're
already supported for huge malloc calls serviced by mmap. The kernel
could also opt to use huge pages for heap ranges consisting of many
independent allocations, but this would probably be a pessimization in
the general case because it precludes fine-grained swapping of unused
data and like you mentioned has ridiculous overhead.

Rich