Lots of people were excited by the news over Hangover’s port to ppc64le, and while there’s a long way to go, the fact it exists is a definite step forward to improving the workstation experience on OpenPOWER. Except, of course, that many folks (including your humble author) can’t run it: Hangover currently requires a kernel with a 4K memory page size, which is the page size of the majority of extant systems (certainly x86_64, which only offers a 4K page size). ppc64 and ppc64le can certainly run on a 4K page size and some distributions do, yet the two probably most common distributions OpenPOWER users run — Debian and Fedora — default to a 64K page size.
This article gives an answer to the question why.
It sounds like the author forgot about page size extensions that allow for larger pages on x86. This wikipedia post articulates all of the same pros and cons, but in the context of x86.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Size_Extension
x86_64bit has more page sizes…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
64K page size is a great feature for servers no matter what Linus Torvalds ranted 12 years ago. If you’re going to put speed limiters on the sports car so it can play nicely with the rest of the fleet, then why buy the sports car in the first place.
Yeah, and 640 mph is enough for everybody…
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