superpages for UMA

[Adrian Chadd]

Hi!

I dug into this a little bit last year. I saw a lot of time spent just
walking TLBs for VM pages when doing a lot of VM page -> network
pushing.

On the sandy bridge boxes with 1G page entries, the TLB only has 4 entries.

The high area of memory isn't 1G aligned, so we don't use 1G pages for
all the stuff that's allocated initially. That includes, among other
things, all the VM memory that you need.

The other thing that crept up was that we don't try to reserve memory
in any way - we'll just fragment stuff quickly from the pmap and
allocate where we can when we can. So there's currently no attempt to
allocate small kernel structures from the same underlying 1G page.

That'd be an interesting experiment - allocating VM entries and other
small things like rtentry and mbuf UMA entries from one or two 1GB
regions of memory. It may make better use of the 1G (or 2M) TLB
entries and keep things hot.



-a