Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/839737/rss

Kernel development is a constant exercise in reducing overhead; any
resources taken by the kernel are not available for the workload that users
actually want to run. As part of this, the page
structure used to manage memory has been kept as small as possible.
Even so, page structures typically take up just over 1.5% of the
available memory, which is too much for some users. LWN recently looked at DMEMFS as one approach to reduce
this overhead, but that is not the only work happening in this area. Two
developers are currently working independently on patches to reduce the
overhead associated with huge pages in particular.