On 25-apr-2006, at 20:34, Tom Lane wrote:

Paul van der Zwan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
On 25-apr-2006, at 16:46, Tom Lane wrote:
AFAICS, SHM_SHARE_MMU has no
guaranteed semantic effect anyway, it's just a performance hint; so
ignoring it on platforms that can't handle it is reasonable.

I disagree, I have no definite info  why it is a hard failure,
probably because
there is no way to communicate to the app that it's request is
ignored.

Which applications do you think will do anything except exactly what you
are proposing we do, ie, just redo the call without the flag bit?  Why
are you going to make every application jump through this hoop in order
to cope with a (possibly temporary) inadequacy in some seldom-used
versions of Solaris?

We'll probably put in the kluge because we have no other choice, but
I strongly disagree that it's our problem.


I think I have to make something clear, I am not part of the Solaris Engineering group and even though I work for Sun I personally have probably less influence on Solaris than a customer. What I wrote/write is my personal opinion and I should insert the usual
disclaimer about me not 'officially' representing Sun Microsystems .

I personally do believe that silently failing or ignoring something an application asks for explicitely is bad, if the application wants it and does not get it, the OS should communicate this to
the application.
I feel it is up to the application and not to the OS to decide how to respond when the request fails. It may be true that all or most applications will just redo it, or they may do something else
because ISM is not present, to be honest I do not know.
The code you suggested is IMHO a clean way to ask for an optimization and gracefully accept the denial
and continue without it.

My guess is the absence of ISM on the VIA cpu is purely a hardware issue and not related to a 'seldom used version of Solaris' as there are no different versions of Solaris, only different releases. If the hardware does not support something it may be difficult or impossible for an OS to implement a feature. It would be nice though if every CPU supports the large pages so the failure would never happen.


Regards
         Paul


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