Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/887753/

When the kernel first gained support for
huge pages, most of the work was left to user space. System administrators
had to set
aside memory in the special hugetlbfs filesystem for huge pages, and
programs had to explicitly map memory from there. Over time, the transparent huge pages mechanism automated the
task of using huge pages. That mechanism is not perfect, though, and some
users feel that they have better knowledge of when huge-page use makes sense
for a given process. Thus, huge pages are now coming full circle with this patch
set from Zach O’Keefe returning huge pages to user-space control.