PowerPC 64-bit To Support Up To 512TB Virtual Address Space On Linux 4.12

While Intel is working on 5-level paging support to allow a virtual address space up to 128 PiB and physical address space of 4 PiB, the PowerPC guys are working on upping their address space capabilities too.

With the Linux 4.12 kernel, POWER 64-bit server CPUs can now support up to 512TB of virtual address space compared to a previous limit of 128TB.

The Linux 4.12 changes also have continued work on the POWER9 CPU support. POWER9 systems are still slated to be shipping this year as IBM's 14nm FinFET CPUs in 12 and 24 core versions with SMT4. We've seen POWER9 work going into the mainline Linux kernel now for a number of cycles. POWER9 work in Linux 4.12 includes support for a new "XIVE" interrupt controller, a TLB flushing optimization, CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Interface Architecture 2.0 cards support, and more.

The complete listing of Power changes for Linux 4.12 via this pull request.