The IBM System z10™ mainframe provides an architectural
framework for 1-MB virtual pages. With the new support provided
in z/OS® 1.9, these large pages can be transparently used by
middleware and applications. The use of large virtual memory
pages for storage allocated at addresses above 2 GB can deliver
significant performance gains. This paper reviews computer
architecture trends and describes various implementations of large
pages across the industry to explain why large pages are needed in
today’s operating system environments. It also reports results from
innovative work focused on which workloads are subject to the
largest performance boost from the use of large pages and how
large-page support has been implemented on the System z10
platform and in the z/OS operating system. Results from recent
performance tests are presented and analyzed.
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