Arm Preparing The Linux Kernel For 128-bit Page Table Entries “FEAT_D128”
Arm Preparing The Linux Kernel For 128-bit Page Table Entries “FEAT_D128”
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-Linux-FEAT-D128-Patches
Publish Date: 2026-05-13 05:30:00
Source Domain: www.phoronix.com
A new core infrastructure improvement for the Linux kernel on ARM being worked on is enabling 128-bit page table entries (PTEs) with FEAT_D128 as a new optional feature of Armv9.3 and later.
FEAT_D128 allows selectively enabling VMSAv9-128 as a new translation system for handling 128 bit page table entries in order to support larger physical and virtual address memory ranges. Beyond the larger physical/virtual memory addressing, FEAT_D128 also enables more room for additional MMU management feature bits for both hardware and software.
The current Linux kernel patches for Arm’s FEAT_D128 are under a request for comments (RFC) flag. There are also some known limitations such as KVM, Kernel Address Sanitizer, and other select features not currently being supported with FEAT_D128.
Those interested in this 128-bit page table entries support for ARM can see the RFC patch series for all the details.
