Bring 2 GB Large Pages to Solaris 10
- by Giri Mandalika
Few facts:
8 KB is the default page size on Oracle Solaris 10 and 11 as of this writing
Both hardware and software must have support for 2 GB large pages
SPARC T4 processors are capable of supporting 2 GB pages
Oracle Solaris 11 kernel has in-built support for 2 GB pages
Oracle Solaris 10 has no default support for 2 GB pages
Memory intensive 64-bit applications may benefit the most from using 2 GB pages
Prerequisites:
OS: Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 (Update 10) or later
Hardware: Oracle servers with SPARC T4 processors e.g., SPARC T4-1, T4-2 or T4-4, SPARC SuperCluster T4-4
Steps to enable 2 GB large pages on Oracle Solaris 10:
Install the latest kernel patch or ensure that 147440-04 or later was installed
Check the patch download instructions
Add the following line to /etc/system and reboot
set max_uheap_lpsize=0x80000000
Finally check the output of the following command when the system is back online
pagesize -a
eg.,
% pagesize -a
8192 <-- 8K
65536 <-- 64K
4194304 <-- 4M
268435456 <-- 256M
2147483648 <-- 2G
% uname -a
SunOS jar-jar 5.10 Generic_147440-21 sun4v sparc sun4v
Also See:
Solaris 9 or later: More performance with Large Pages (MPSS)
Large page support for instructions (text) in Solaris 10 1/06
Solaris: How To Disable Out Of The Box (OOB) Large Page Support?
Memory fragmentation / Large Pages on Solaris x86
