Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974937/

One of the long-term goals of the folio conversion in the kernel’s
memory-management subsystem is the replacement of the page
structure, which describes a page of physical memory, with an eight-byte
“memory descriptor”. This change would reduce the overhead of tracking
physical memory, increase type safety, and make memory management more
flexible. Thus far, though, details on what the memory-descriptor future
will look like have been relatively scarce. At the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Matthew Wilcox led a
discussion to try to fill in the picture somewhat.