malloc - cache locality - TLB

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 05:43:38PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> No it doesn't. That's the old, nasty, should-be-deprecated
> non-transparent way. With transparent huge pages enabled in the
> kernel, the kernel simply uses them when you call mmap without
> userspace ever having to be aware of it.

A minor nit: the kernel doesn't directly use huge pages for large
allocations.  i believe the initial page faults are serviced using
regular pages and there's a separate kernel thread that does
consolidation of those pages into huge pages using some kind of
heuristic.  But yeah, the process (true to its name) is completely
transparent.

Siddhesh