Re: AIX disclaim() or Tru64 madvise (MADV_DONTNEED) needed

Tethys (tethys@it.newsint.co.uk)
Fri, 20 Aug 1999 14:33:21 +0100


Christoph Rohland <hans-christoph.rohland@sap-ag.de> writes:

> Also I am not sure which API should be used:

I'd go for madvise() -- it's more widespread than disclaim(),
even if details may differ slightly between implementations.
Neither are in the SUS v2 spec, although I don't know about v3.

> (1) madvise is known on many systems, but they do not agree about the
> meaning of MADV_DONTNEED. Most of them only use it as hint to page
> this area out. Perhaps a flag MADV_FREE or MADV_DISCLAIM would be
> better.

Why is this a problem? Whether the pages ares freed immediately
or merely marked to be freed at a later time should be of no
relevance to the application, only to the OS. Or are you relying
on the zero-fill-on-demand behaviour? What do you do on other
OSes that don't support this (e.g., Solaris)?

Tet

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