Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025629/

Transparent huge pages (THPs) are, theoretically, supposed to allow processes to
benefit from larger page sizes without changes to their code. This does work,
but the performance impacts from THPs are not always a benefit, so system
administrators with specific knowledge of their workloads may want the ability
to fine-tune THPs to the application. On May 15, Usama Arif

shared a patch set that would add a

prctl() option for setting THP defaults for a process; that patch
set has sparked discussion about whether such a setting is a good fit for
prctl(), and what alternative designs may work instead.