[PATCH v2 01/11] kexec: introduce kexec_ops struct

[Jan Beulich]

>>> On 22.11.12 at 18:37, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> I actually talked to Ian Jackson at LCE, and mentioned among other 
> things the bogosity of requiring a PUD page for three-level paging in 
> Linux -- a bogosity which has spread from Xen into native.  It's a page 
> wasted for no good reason, since it only contains 32 bytes worth of 
> data, *inherently*.  Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it is 
> *not* pa page table per se.
> 
> Ian told me: "I didn't know we did that, and we shouldn't have to." 
> Here we have suffered this overhead for at least six years, ...

Even the Xen kernel only needs the full page when running on a
64-bit hypervisor (now that we don't have a 32-bit hypervisor
anymore, that of course basically means always). But yes, I too
never liked this enforced over-allocation for native kernels (and
was surprised that it was allowed in at all).

Jan