Red Hat Knowledgebase

Hugepages is a mechanism that allows the Linux kernel to utilise the multiple page size capabilities of modern hardware architectures. Linux uses pages as the basic unit of memory - physical memory is partitioned and accessed using the basic page unit. The default page size is 4096 Bytes in the x86 architecture.

Hugepages allows large amounts of memory to be utilised with a reduced overhead. Linux uses a mechanism in the CPU architecture called "Transaction Lookaside Buffers" (TLB). These buffers contain mappings of virtual memory to actual physical memory addresses. The TLB is a limited hardware resource, so utilising a huge amount of physical memory with the default page size consumes the TLB and adds processing overhead.

The Linux kernel is able to set aside a portion of physical memory to be able be addressed using a larger page size. Since the page size is higher, there will be less overhead managing the pages with the TLB.

In the Linux 2.6 series of kernels, hugepages is enabled using the CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE feature when the kernel is built. All kernels supplied by Red Hat for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 release have the feature enabled.

Systems with large amount of memory can be configured to utilise the memory more efficiently by setting aside a portion dedicated for hugepages. The actual size of the page is dependent on the system architecture. A typical x86 system will have a Huge Page Size of 2048 kBytes. The huge page size may be found by looking at the /proc/meminfo :

# cat /proc/meminfo |grep Hugepagesize
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB