[Discuss] khugepaged + vmware = massive CPU load

[Daniel Barrett]

On December 11, 2015, Dan Ritter wrote:
>Normally your system keeps track of memory in 4KB pages. They're
>analogous to filesystem blocks. [...] A hugepage is a 2MB page.

Dan, thanks for a beautiful explanation. I really appreciate it.

>In the 2.x kernel series where they were invented, hugepages had
>to be turned on explicitly (there's a sysctl) and applications
>had to request them.

Hmm... when I upgraded from 14.04 to 15.10, this included a move from
a 3.x kernel to a 4.x kernel. Perhaps transparent hugepages got
enabled by default in 4.x.

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com