Where did the 64K page size come from?

Lots of people were excited by the news over Hangover's port to ppc64le, and while there's a long way to go, the fact it exists is a definite step forward to improving the workstation experience on OpenPOWER. Except, of course, that many folks (including your humble author) can't run it: Hangover currently requires a kernel with a 4K memory page size, which is the page size of the majority of extant systems (certainly x86_64, which only offers a 4K page size). ppc64 and ppc64le can certainly run on a 4K page size and some distributions do, yet the two probably most common distributions OpenPOWER users run - Debian and Fedora - default to a 64K page size.

This article gives an answer to the question why.