Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 15 May 1996 12:14:47 -0500 (EST)
From:      "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
To:        jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco)
Cc:        dyson@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: A question for the VM gurus..!
Message-ID:  <199605151714.MAA22723@dyson.iquest.net>
In-Reply-To: <199605151445.JAA12093@brasil.moneng.mei.com> from "Joe Greco" at May 15, 96 09:45:08 am

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> 
> Not portable.  Solaris, at least, implements the madvise() stuff..
> 
Okay..

>
> What it seems to do:
> 
> If you set MADV_SEQUENTIAL on a region, if it has to fault a page "n" in, it
> looks like it discards all pages from 0 to n-1 in that region..  notably it
> does NOT seem to do anything if it doesn't have to fault a page in.
> 
Is there only one process accessing the region?  What happens if there
are other processes using that region also?  Otherwise, that is easy to
do in our VM system.

>
> MADV_RANDOM seems to cause a lot more faults if you are doing sequential
> accesses, as far as I can tell it just tells Solaris not to read ahead.
> 
That is easy also.

>
> MADV_DONTNEED appears to junk pages (asynchronously, from what I can tell)
> 
Easy.

>
> MADV_WILLNEED appears to fault pages (again, asynchrnously, from what I can
> tell).
> 
Hmmm...  time to implement kernel threads.

> 
> I guess in the _short_ term I am most interested in support for
> MADV_DONTNEED, it is the most generally useful change for my application.
> However, it would be nice to have a full suite of this stuff in the future.
> 
Okay, I'll work on it this weekend.  Probably implement everything except
WILLNEED, and will give WILLNEED lip-service by making sure all of the
pages are activated (and perhaps mapped), if they are already in memory.

I will work on it this weekend or soon thereafter.

John



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199605151714.MAA22723>