Intel's 5-Level Paging Support Being Prepped For Linux 4.12

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 27 March 2017 at 01:11 PM EDT. 11 Comments
INTEL
For months there have been Intel developers working on 5-level paging to increase Linux's virtual/physical address space limitations and with Linux 4.12 it looks like that will be supported.

Five level paging allows raising the Linux x86_64 limitation of 256 TiB of virtual address space to 128 PiB and raises the physical address space limit from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. While 64 TiB of memory may seem like a lot, some Intel customers are already hitting this limitation.

The new paging mode is exposed via the CONFIG_X86_5LEVEL Kconfig switch. Future Intel CPUs will support 5-level paging.

The latest set of 5-level paging patches have been posted to the kernel mailing list and looks like the developers are aligning them for merging into the Linux 4.12 merge window that will open at the end of April.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week