Aha, so the contiguity of the actual memory pages must not be what is used for prefetching by the MMU, instead it is the contiguity of the virtual address space?

I was thrown for a bit of a loop working through virtual vs actual memory addresses and how this works under the hood, but it makes more sense now. In that case then virtual_vec would be better than std::deque in terms of iterating over the contained data in order.