> It doesn't. It would only mark free'd pages as disposable. Pages
> that the application is not supposed to use anyway. Of course, I'm
> not quite sure how much better this would be compared to having a
> malloc library that returns unused pages to the OS.
OK - this makes sense now. I still don't see how libc gets told about
this portably though....
> Well, disposing of disposable pages can be done without application
> involvement (at the OOM time) which makes a big difference since
> when you're out of memory, your application's ENOMEM handler would
> probably fail.
We just need to send ENOMEM before it gets super-critical, sysctl
tunable with sane defaults perhaps.
And assumnig thats possible - why not put a ENOMEM handler in libc
that actively returns pages to the kernel?
-cw
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