Re: differences between MADV_FREE and MADV_DONTNEED

From: Suleiman Souhlal
Date: Mon Jan 16 2006 - 19:22:40 EST


Eric W. Biederman wrote:
As I recall the logic with DONTNEED was to mark the mapping of
the page clean so the page didn't need to be swapped out, it could
just be dropped.

That is why they anonymous and the file backed cases differ.

Part of the point is to avoid the case of swapping the pages out if
the application doesn't care what is on them anymore.

Well, imho, MADV_DONTNEED should mean "I won't need this anytime soon", and MADV_FREE "I will never need this again".

-- Suleiman
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/