Re: Ideas for memory management hackers (2)

Hans-Christoph Rohland (hans-christoph.rohland@sap-ag.de)
18 Nov 1997 09:53:02 +0100

linux kernel account <linker@nightshade.z.ml.org> writes:
> On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > The need for MADV_DONTNEED is a similar problem: no memory manager can
> > > know that I really don't need a part of memory any more. It will
> > > always try to save the memory in backing store.
> > > But especially transactional programs process some memory and when the
> > > transaction finishes there is no need to get this content again. It
> > > will be overwritten by the next transaction. So the program can
> > > advise the OS to simply discard the page instead of saving the page to
> > > the swapfile. This can increase the system performance a lot under low
> > > physical memory.
> >
> > Ahh, I get it. Now, how should we implement this one?
>
> Simple, optimize memory allocation and deallocation, then the app
> unallocates it.. :)

This does not work for shared allocations and I am thinking of something
that works on shared pages.