[squirrellous]

This is quite interesting since I, too, was under the impression that mmap cannot be used on disk-backed files with huge pages. I tried and failed to find any official kernel documentation around this, but I clearly remember trying to do this at work (on a regular ECS machine with Ubuntu) and getting errors.

Based on this SO discussion [1], it is possibly a limitation with popular filesystems like ext4?

If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to know what exactly are the requirements for using hugepages this way.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44060678/huge-pages-for-...

[inetknght]

My bad, don't use `MAP_HUGETLB`, just use `MAP_HUGE_1GB`.

See a quick example I whipped up here: https://github.com/inetknght/mmap-hugetlb

[squirrellous]

Cool! Thanks for the example. The aforementioned work thing requires MAP_SHARED as well which IIRC is the reason it would fail when used together with files and huge pages, but private mappings work as you show.

[bawolff]

Trying to google this i found https://lwn.net/Articles/718102/ which suggests that there was discussion about it back in 2017. But i can't find anything else about it except a patchset that i guess wasnt merged (?). So maybe it was just a proposal that never made it in.

Honestly i never knew any of this i thought huge pages just worked for all of mmap.