Hugepages are a hardware feature designed to reduce pressure on the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) for applications that operate on large contiguous memory regions.
Take a program that operates on a large 2MB internal structure as an example. If the program accesses that space in such a way that one byte in each regular 4k page is accessed, 2M/4k = 512 TLB entries are needed. Each TLB miss at the hardware level requires and interrupt and kernel intervention to resolve. However, if the allocation is backed by a 2M hugepage by mmap()ing with MAP_HUGETLB, only 1 TLB entry is required.
On x86_64, there are two hugepage sizes: 2MB and 1G. 1G hugepages are also called gigantic pages. 1G must be enabled on kernel boot line with hugepagesz=1G. Hugeages, especially 1G ones, should to be allocated early before memory fragments (i.e. at/near boot time) to increase the likelihood that they can be allocated successfully with minimal memory migration (i.e. defreg) required