Is it possible to change virtual memory page size?

Question

Is it possible to change the virtual memory page size? I'm asking this because in the X86_64 part of the MMU article on wikipedia, it talks about different page sizes. If the page size can indeed be changed, how it is changed?

Answer 1

On x86_64 you can explicitly request 2 MiB pages instead of the usual 4 KiB pages with the help of hugetlbfs. On modern kernels with transparent huge page support a small pages can automagically concatenated to huge pages in the background, given that the memory fragmentation isn't to big and enough memory is still free.