PgConf.Russia 2016 talks

Linux VMM for database developers

Alexander Krizhanovsky
NatSys Lab

Alexander is CEO at Tempesta Technologies Inc. and lead developer of Tempesta FW. He's also founder of NatSys Lab., a company providing consultancy in high performance computing in Linux/x86-64 environment. Alexander has more than 10 years of experience in Linux kernel and 5 years in MySQL, InnoDB and Galera Cluster.

We'll discuss how does Linux work with virtual memory. The following topics will be covered: * x86-64 page table, context switch and page fault; * internals of virtual memory management (VMM) in Linux; * page eviction methods in Linux, page cache and anonymous pages; * huge and gigantic pages, transparent huge pages; * how mmap(2) works and what madvise(2), msync(2) etc. provide; * why large databases don't use mmap(2), but rather implement buffer pool on their own; * ans surely how to tune Linux VMM using sysctl.

Slides