mlockmunlock
- lock (unlock) physical pages in memory
LIBRARY
Lb libc
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/mman.h> int
mlock (const void *addr size_t len); int
munlock (const void *addr size_t len);
DESCRIPTION
The
mlock ();
system call
locks into memory the physical pages associated with the virtual address
range starting at
Fa addr
for
Fa len
bytes.
The
munlock ();
system call unlocks pages previously locked by one or more
mlock ();
calls.
For both, the
Fa addr
argument should be aligned to a multiple of the page size.
If the
Fa len
argument is not a multiple of the page size, it will be rounded up
to be so.
The entire range must be allocated.
After an
mlock ();
system call, the indicated pages will cause neither a non-resident page
nor address-translation fault until they are unlocked.
They may still cause protection-violation faults or TLB-miss faults on
architectures with software-managed TLBs.
The physical pages remain in memory until all locked mappings for the pages
are removed.
Multiple processes may have the same physical pages locked via their own
virtual address mappings.
A single process may likewise have pages multiply-locked via different virtual
mappings of the same pages or via nested
mlock ();
calls on the same address range.
Unlocking is performed explicitly by
munlock ();
or implicitly by a call to
munmap ();
which deallocates the unmapped address range.
Locked mappings are not inherited by the child process after a
fork(2).
Since physical memory is a potentially scarce resource, processes are
limited in how much they can lock down.
A single process can
mlock ();
the minimum of
a system-wide ``wired pages'' limit and
the per-process
RLIMIT_MEMLOCK
resource limit.
These calls are only available to the super-user.
RETURN VALUES
Rv -std
If the call succeeds, all pages in the range become locked (unlocked);
otherwise the locked status of all pages in the range remains unchanged.
ERRORS
The
mlock ();
system call
will fail if:
Bq Er EPERM
The caller is not the super-user.
Bq Er EINVAL
The address given is not page aligned or the length is negative.
Bq Er EAGAIN
Locking the indicated range would exceed either the system or per-process
limit for locked memory.
Bq Er ENOMEM
Some portion of the indicated address range is not allocated.
There was an error faulting/mapping a page.
The
munlock ();
system call
will fail if:
Bq Er EPERM
The caller is not the super-user.
Bq Er EINVAL
The address given is not page aligned or the length is negative.
Bq Er ENOMEM
Some portion of the indicated address range is not allocated.
The
mlock ();
and
munlock ();
system calls first appeared in
BSD 4.4
BUGS
Allocating too much wired memory can lead to a memory-allocation deadlock
which requires a reboot to recover from.
The per-process resource limit is a limit on the amount of virtual
memory locked, while the system-wide limit is for the number of locked
physical pages.
Hence a process with two distinct locked mappings of the same physical page
counts as 2 pages against the per-process limit and as only a single page
in the system limit.
The per-process resource limit is not currently supported.