Virtual Memory

So now AMD 0x10 processors can handle 1GB pages, according to Alan Cox’s commit today! It would be exciting to see it on FreeBSD 8.0 (already in -HEAD).

(I’m still looking for a development desktop PC donation, see the FreeBSD wantlist)

To quote Matthew Dillon:

While I hope to avoid any destabilization, I am fiddling with some pretty hairy code in the VM system so this is a head’s up!I have successfully implemented a basic MAP_VPAGETABLE feature that allows a mmap()’d section of memory to be governed by a virtual page table. Basically the backing store for the mmap()’d space is the‘physical memory’ used to map the space, and the mapping of the space is then governed by a ‘page table’ stored in that physical memory.(It is only physical memory from the point of view of the virtual kernel, not the real kernel of course). The mapping will store a physical page directory offset to tell the VM system where the page table is.

Don Lewis (truckman@) has committed a fix for the sysctl spinning problem I mentioned here some days before. Currently, beastie.frontfree.net is running a workaround which made it possible to skip the deadlock, however, will not guarantee the correct result.