Jonathan Blow

Which makes me really want some kind of VirtualAlloc flag :) I don't think there's any practical reason we can't have close to the 6/0ms case with 4k pages, if it's handled in bulk, rather than as a continuous series of faults?

(And just to be clear, the reason I can't "just use 2mb pages" is because you basically can't ship something that uses 2mb pages - it requires the user to do a manual group policy edit to enable!)

wait what!? so they added bigger pages to the ISA and we just don't use them?

So what would you do if you had to page in a 2MB page when there isn't 2MB of contiguous physical memory?

I understand that this is apparently a concern, but I'm not sure I understand why. On modern machines that all have 16+gb of memory, is there some reason the OS can't just sub-divide 4k pages from 2mb pages, and evict all 512 4k pages when deciding to swap in a 2mb page?

That is assuming there are backwards compatibility reasons why you have to keep supporting 4k pages in "compatibility" mode, etc. - I can't honestly see there being a point to 4k pages for the normal case of modern apps that all use literally gigabytes of memory?

Also, paging is kind of for chumps anyway? Like, the OS probably has to support it, but you don’t actually want to be doing it ever, so, probably should not design for that as a primary use case.