[dpdk-dev] Ability to/impact of running with smaller page sizes

[Liu, Jijiang]

Hi Matt,

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 05:43:39PM -0500, Matt Laswell wrote:
> Hey Folks,
> 
> In my application, I'm seeing some design considerations in a project 
> I'm working on that push me towards the use of smaller memory page 
> sizes.  I'm curious - is it possible in practical terms to run DPDK without hugepages?

>  If so, does anybody have any practical experience (or a 
> back-of-the-envelop estimate) of how badly such a configuration would 
> hurt performance?  For sake of argument, assume that virtually all of 
> the memory being used is in pre-allocated mempools (e.g lots of 
> rte_mempool_create(), very little rte_malloc().
> 

There is an case to run DPDK without hugepages in DPDK source codes, which is DPDK supports Xen Dom0. for this, we developed a dom0_mm driver. 
Except for Xen Dom0, it is impossible to run DPDK without hugepages without any changes at memory initialization phase, but current rte_memzone_reserve_bounded() and 
rte_mempool_xmem_create()  implemention have already support non-hugepage usage in DPDK.
 
   
  
Thanks,
Jeff