Introduction / Overview

The POWER5+™ processor and AIX 5L™ Version 5.3 with the 5300-04 Recommended
Maintenance Package introduce support for two new virtual memory page sizes . 64KB
and 16GB. Using larger virtual memory page sizes for an application’s memory can
significantly improve an application's performance and throughput due to hardware
efficiencies associated with larger page sizes. While 16GB pages are intended to only be
used in very high-performance environments, 64KB pages are general-purpose, and most
workloads will likely see a benefit by using 64KB pages rather than 4KB pages. This
document gives an overview of the new multiple page size support of AIX 5L and how a
user can use these new page sizes for an application’s memory to potentially improve
performance.

Software Requirements

AIX 5L Version 5.3 with the 5300-04 Recommended Maintenance Package is required
for 64KB and 16GB page size support.

The minimum IBM System p5™ microcode level required for 64KB and 16GB page size
support is p5 System Release 240, Service Level 202.

In order to allocate 16GB huge pages on a system, Version 5 Release 2 of the Hardware
Management Console (HMC) machine code is required.

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