This document gives you details about tunable virtual memory parameters in Linux, that can help you to improve your system performance.

vm.nr_hugepages

Linux 2.6 has the feature which allows processes to use large paging sizes, called as hugetlb pages. This feature will be used to gain good performance in high performance computing systems. Hugetlb behavior is similar to that of bigpages, the pages are backed by large TLB entries, are not pageable, and are preallocated, which means that once you allocate X megabytes of hugetlb pages, that amount of physical memory can be used only through hugetlbfs.

/proc/meminfo also provides information about the total number of hugetlb pages configured in the kernel. It also displays information about the number of free hugetlb pages at any time.  It also displays information about the configured hugepage size - this is needed for generating the proper alignment and size of the arguments to the above system calls.