Transparent Hugepages Are Coming To RISC-V On Linux

The Linux kernel's RISC-V support continues picking up remaining features not yet wired up beyond the base architecture support. The latest is transparent hugepages (THP) to be supported for RISC-V with Linux 5.14.

Following recent RISC-V kernel additions like XIP for execute in place, support for KProbes and other features, and hardware specific work like SiFive FU740 SoC support, the latest RISC-V kernel action is transparent hugepages now being ready.

Transparent Hugepages is the Linux memory management functionality to reduce TLB overhead for page lookups and improve performance particularly for systems with large amounts of memory. THP can improve performance except for some workloads like some database servers while providing the hugepages support in a transparent manner without any extra work/changes by the application.

Thanks to kernel work by Huawei engineers, THP support on 64-bit RISC-V is now ready and part of RISC-V's "for-next" branch of the Linux kernel.

This RISC-V THP support that is queued into the "next" branch should be merged for the Linux 5.14 cycle in the coming weeks.