On 4/20/07, Andrew Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
OK, we need to flesh this out a lot please. People often get confused about what our MADV_DONTNEED behaviour is.
Well, there's not really much to flesh out. The current MADV_DONTNEED is useful in some situations. The behavior cannot be changed, even glibc will rely on it for the case when MADV_FREE is not supported. What might be nice to have is to have a POSIX-compliant POSIX_MADV_DONTNEED implementation. We currently do nothing which is OK since no test suite can detect that. But some code might want to use the real behavior and we're missing an optimization possibility. Just for reference: the MADV_CURRENT behavior is to throw away data in the range. The POSIX_MADV_DONTNEED behavior is to never lose data. I.e., file backed data is written back, anon data is at most swapped out. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/