On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 01:51:41AM +0100, Reindl Harald wrote: > Google around brings no clear statement > > is there any drawback of boot with "transparent_hugepage=always" which seems > not to be the default currently - as far as i understand it should recude > the overhead of memory management (especially in virtual guests) and seems > to have been the default for some time > > http://oracle-base.com/articles/linux/configuring-huge-pages-for-oracle-o... > at least talks about "You can check the current setting using the following > command, which is displaying the default value of "enabled=[always]" > > https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/... We had this set to always for quite a while. However, it isn't a win on all workloads. You can run into overhead in cases where you have a smaller amount of RAM that is often allocated and freed frequently, which fragments it quite a bit and causes a lot of hugepages to be broken into regular pages, etc. We discussed this a bit with the upstream developers and they didn't expect big wins in a typical desktop or laptop machine. We switched to madvise by default so that applications that can benefit still do, while the overhead for everything else is reduced. For static workloads like databases, or virt hosts, or machines with larger amounts of RAM it might make sense to have it as always