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Fedora 35 (was F-34): going to 4k page size? Help needed

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pocock:
We had some discussions in fedora-devel about changing the default page size from 64k back to 4k

This could be done for Fedora 34 - I opened a change request under Fedora policy

How do people feel about this?

Does anybody want to take ownership of the Fedora change request?

Technically, only one line of code needs to change but there is some coordination to make sure everything in userland is rebuilt and to do some tests of the installer as a bare minimum.


--- Code: ---CONFIG_PPC_64K_PAGES=n

--- End code ---

I might be willing to take ownership of the change personally but if somebody else wants to take ownership, that will free up some of my time for other things.

It is also important to verify that other users are comfortable with this strategy: please feel free to comment through the Fedora mailing list.

ClassicHasClass:
I see sharkcz is already involved in this conversation. I personally am not aware of anything that would break as a result (in fact, as you correctly point out, many things would suddenly "just work"). My only hesitancy is it would make 64K page kernels more of a pariah than they are already, sort of like another situation with big-endian, and there are performance reasons for 64K pages. Might this, perhaps, be a Workstation-only change and keep the performance benefits for Fedora Server?

pocock:
I already asked this question in the same Fedora thread and it was answered there.  It looks like an extra hassle for them but maybe they can be persuaded, after all, IBM now owns Red Hat.

The page size issue impacts multiple architectures, not only ppc64el.  If proponents of bigger page sizes are willing to invest in resolving it, there are developers who will step up to help and there are tools we can use to detect signs of these problems.  It is a bit like Covid contact tracing, if the right people act with the right tools, we can solve it but we also have other battles to fight too.

MauryG5:
Hi Pocock, I saw your post you tell Fedora developers about this issue that has been around for us for some time now, but do you think we could finally fix this damn crash problem on Navi 10?  You seem to have been supporting this for some time now, as you have seen I think, I was able to start Debian with Wayland's carelessness and the new firmware which obviously was only a Debian problem, but on Fedora we still have to evaluate.  I am trying to modify the Kernel but I noticed that the Fedora one, downloaded from their handouts and therefore official, does not allow to decompress and therefore I cannot try to enter to change the page size and do a test accordingly, then also disabling  Wayland ...

pocock:

You need to re-compile the Fedora kernel

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