Large page usage to back data and heap segments
You must determine an application's large page data or heap usage when you execute the application because the application cannot switch modes after it starts executing. Large page usage is inherited by the children process of the fork() function.
You can configure an application to request large page backing of initialized program data, uninitialized program data (BSS), and heap segments with the following methods:
- Marking the executable file to request large pages
- Setting an environment variable to request large pages
You can specify if you want an application to use large pages for data or heap segments in either of the following modes:
32-bit applications that use large pages for their data and heap segments use the large page 32-bit process model because of the page protection granularity of large pages. Other process models use 4 KB pages with different protection attributes in the same segment, which does not work when the protection granularity is 16 MB.