Depends what you mean by "works fine". imho any feature that can sent the kernel off into a tens of seconds dream state underneath my process is just unforgivable and totally broken. Definitely good to hear that this is being done out of band now.
I guess what I said is that most of the time latency is not as important as throughput. And in those scenarios it generally works fine.
The best out of both worlds though (although then it requires more manual work) is pre-allocating HugaPages in advance and then let application use them (if the application supports it) or through libhugetlbfs (if it doesn't).
Edit: changed hugetlbfs to libhugetlbfs, so it's easier to find how to do it with man libhugetlbfs
