Prepare your Play app for devices with 16 KB page sizes

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEVEN MORELAND: Hello. My name is Steven Moreland.

I'm on the Android Systems team, and I've been leading the 16 KB page size project in Android for the past few years.

We've been working hard behind the scenes to make sure Android works great in this mode.

And I'd like to share with you some of what I've learned, what you need to do, and even what the heck a 16 KB page size is.

Memory pages are a fundamental building block of modern computer infrastructure, ensuring the security and performance that we all rely on to live our lives.

Special hardware in almost all computers uses pages to keep track of which memory belongs to which applications and what they can do with it.

Applications request pages from the operating system with read, write, and/or execute permissions.

The bigger the pages are, the fewer we need to request.

If you're interested in learning more, the TLB, or Translation Lookaside Buffer, and the MMU, or Memory Management Unit, are two quasiuniversal pieces of hardware that we need to supercharge.

The TLB caches virtual address translations, and the MMU manages those translations and memory lookups.