Subject: Re: how to prevent a process from being paged?
To: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
From: Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/01/1999 13:36:42
On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Jason Thorpe wrote:

:  > Let us suppose that I have a program which requires real-time response from
:  > the system, and thus must not be paged (or swapped) out of RAM; how does
:  > one tell the NetBSD kernel that?
: 
: You could mlock your entire address space...

...Which I've done for a program whose sole purpose in life is to watch for
a particular event and call __syscall(SYS_reboot, RB_NOSYNC, NULL) at that
time.  Came in handy a few times when nothing else would respond thanks to 
kmem leaks.  :)

: don't think there's a way to say "not a candidate for swapping" (i.e.
: making the u-area non-resident).

I didn't know that.  Is there a way that such could be implemented, even via
a sysarch() indirection for only particular architectures?

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)