Re: Rationale for RLIMIT_MEMLOCK?

[Joerg Schilling]

Arjan van de Ven <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > And because this requirement is not specified in the relevant standards,
> > it is wrong to assume valloc() returns locked pages. 
>
> is it? I sort of doubt that (but I'm not a standards expert, but I'd
> expect that "lock all in the future" applies to all memory, not just
> mmap'd memory

I concur:

Locking pages into core is a property/duty of the VM subsystem.
If you have an orthogonal VM subsystem, you cannot later tell how a page was 
mapped into the user's address space. Even more: you may map a file to a 
alocation in the data segment of the proces (that has been retrieved via 
malloc()/brk()) and replace the related mapping with a mapped file.

On Solaris, there is no difference.

>
> > You cannot rely on
> > mmap() returning locked pages after mlockall() either, because you might
> > be exceeding resource limits.
>
> this is true and fully correct
>
>
>
> the situation is messy; I can see some value in the hack Ted proposed to
> just bump the rlimit automatically at an mlockall-done-by-root.. but to
> be fair it's a hack :(

As all other rlimits are honored even if you are root, it looks not orthogonal 
to disregard an existing RLIMIT_MEMLOCK rlimit if you are root.

Jörg

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