>> Why is the kernel mapped as pages not as a section?

>Because it's not an exact size, in theory we could use sections for
>the firxt x MB's then use pages for the remaining part of the kernel,
>however currently everything is rigged towards using 4K pages, to be
>honest it's not something I've actually considered even though I'm
>playing with the pmap.  In theory we could use different sized
>sections, 1MB, 64K, 4K and 1K as appropiate, but that'd get very
>complex, and pmap is tricky enough as it is.

It currently works like that on arm32.

Take a look at map_chunk() in arch/arm32/machdep.c

Robert Swindells