When a File Means a File: Proper Huge Pages for Code

Despite huge pages dramatically reducing CPU frontend stalls from address translation, their use for executable code remains limited due to operating system constraints and impracticality of rebuilding system binaries with special alignment. Current solutions that copy code into huge pages break essential system functionality – preventing memory sharing between processes, disrupting debugging tools, and interfering with memory management operations.

In this talk, I will present a practical userspace solution that achieves huge page performance benefits while preserving critical system services. Our approach transforms binaries to align code segments with huge page boundaries post-linkage while maintaining all internal references, and orchestrates page cache operations to ensure proper mapping. PostgreSQL evaluations demonstrate up to 7% performance improvement through a 94% reduction in iTLB misses, while maintaining memory sharing, debugging support, and proper memory management.