New Funded Project: FreeBSD/ARM Architecture Superpages Support

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Semihalf, an embedded solutions company, has been awarded a grant to develop transparent superpages support for the FreeBSD/ARM architecture. Semihalf is co-sponsoring the project with the Foundation.

The ARM architecture is already common in the mobile and embedded markets, and is becoming more prevalent in the server market. Among the more interesting industry trends emerging recently is the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, which is an "ARM server" concept. Many top tier companies have started developing systems or are announcing products with this architecture.

One of the features needed for FreeBSD to be successful in this area is transparent super pages.  This provides improved performance and scalability by allowing TLB translations to dynamically cover large physical memory regions.

The project is expected to complete in mid July 2013.