Efficient Use of the Page Cache with 64K Pages

In order for 64-bit processors to efficiently use large address spaces while maintaining lower TLB miss rates, the Linux kernel can be configured with base page sizes up to 64 KB.  While this benefits access to large memory segments and files, it greatly reduces the number of smaller files that can be resident in memory at one time.  This paper proposes a change to the Linux kernel to allow file data to be more efficiently stored in memory when the size of the file, or the data at the end of a file, is significantly smaller than the page size.