Superpages in FreeBSD

This talk will describe the addition of superpage support to the FreeBSD 8 kernel on the Intel PC architecture. Superpages aggregate together standard-sized hardware pages into much larger "superpages". Each superpage requires only one entry in the page table replacing the numerous entries used by the standard-sized hardware pages. The result is much smaller page tables and greatly increased coverage by the TLB, producing much higher TLB hit rates for large processes. While superpages are used for all appropriate processes with no explicit request by the applications, understanding how they work will enable you to write your applications to make optimal use of them.