superpages and kmem on amd64

[Marko Zec]

On Sunday 20 May 2012 09:25:59 Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Marko Zec <zec at fer.hr> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm playing with an algorithm which makes use of large contiguous blocks
> > of kernel memory (ranging from 1M to 1G in size), so it would be nice if
> > those could be somehow forcibly mapped to superpages.  I was hoping that
> > the VM system would automagically map (merge) contiguous 4k pages to
> > superpages, but
> > apparently it doesn't:
> >
> > vm.pmap.pdpe.demotions: 2
> > vm.pmap.pde.promotions: 543
> > vm.pmap.pde.p_failures: 266253
> > vm.pmap.pde.mappings: 0
> > vm.pmap.pde.demotions: 31
>
> No, your conclusion is incorrect.  These counts show that 543 superpage
> mappings were created by promotion.

OK, that sounds promising.  Does "created by promotion" count reflect 
historic / cumulative stats, or is vm.pmap.pde.promotions the actual number 
of superpages active?  Or should we subtract vm.pmap.pde.demotions from it to 
get the current value?

In any case, I wish to be certain that a particular kmem virtual address range 
is mapped to superpages - how can I enforce that at malloc time, and / or 
find out later if I really got my kmem mapped to superpages?  Perhaps 
vm_map_lookup() could provide more info, but I'm wondering if someone already 
wrote a wrapper function for that, which takes only the base virtual address 
as a single argument?

BTW, apparently malloc(size, M_TEMP, M_NOWAIT) requests fail for size > 1G, 
even at boot time.  Any ideas how to circumvent that (8.3-STABLE, amd64, 4G 
physical RAM)?

Thanks,

Marko