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Johannes Weiner authored
MADV_DONTNEED historically rejects mlocked ranges, but with MLOCK_ONFAULT and MCL_ONFAULT allowing to mlock without populating, there are valid use cases for depopulating locked ranges as well. Users mlock memory to protect secrets. There are allocators for secure buffers that want in-use memory generally mlocked, but cleared and invalidated memory to give up the physical pages. This could be done with explicit munlock -> mlock calls on free -> alloc of course, but that adds two unnecessary syscalls, heavy mmap_sem write locks, vma splits and re-merges - only to get rid of the backing pages. Users also mlockall(MCL_ONFAULT) to suppress sustained paging, but are okay with on-demand initial population. It seems valid to selectively free some memory during the lifetime of such a process, without having to mess with its overall policy. Why add a separate flag? Isn't this a pretty niche usecase? - MADV_DONTNEED has been bailing on locked vmas forever. It's at least co...
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