On Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 11:46:04AM +0100, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote: > * Kirill A. Shutemov (kirill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 07:07:58PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > > MADV_USERFAULT is a new madvise flag that will set VM_USERFAULT in the > > > vma flags. Whenever VM_USERFAULT is set in an anonymous vma, if > > > userland touches a still unmapped virtual address, a sigbus signal is > > > sent instead of allocating a new page. The sigbus signal handler will > > > then resolve the page fault in userland by calling the > > > remap_anon_pages syscall. > > > > Hm. I wounder if this functionality really fits madvise(2) interface: as > > far as I understand it, it provides a way to give a *hint* to kernel which > > may or may not trigger an action from kernel side. I don't think an > > application will behaive reasonably if kernel ignore the *advise* and will > > not send SIGBUS, but allocate memory. > > Aren't DONTNEED and DONTDUMP similar cases of madvise operations that are > expected to do what they say ? No. If kernel would ignore MADV_DONTNEED or MADV_DONTDUMP it will not affect correctness, just behaviour will be suboptimal: more than needed memory used or wasted space in coredump. -- Kirill A. Shutemov -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>