as per this discussion:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/12/423
Pardo reported that 64-bit threaded apps, if their stacks exceed the
combined size of ~4GB, slow down drastically in pthread_create() - because
glibc uses MAP_32BIT to allocate the stacks. The use of MAP_32BIT is
a legacy hack - to speed up context switching on certain early model
64-bit P4 CPUs.
So introduce a new flag to be used by glibc instead, to not constrain
64-bit apps like this.
glibc can switch to this new flag straight away - it will be ignored
by the kernel. If those old CPUs ever matter to anyone, support for
it can be implemented.
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Acked-by: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@gmail.com>
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