From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from flinx.npwt.net (eric@flinx.npwt.net [208.236.161.237]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id KAA00416 for ; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 10:25:50 -0400 Subject: Re: Thread implementations... References: <199806240915.TAA09504@vindaloo.atnf.CSIRO.AU> <199806241213.WAA10661@vindaloo.atnf.CSIRO.AU> <199806242341.JAA15101@vindaloo.atnf.CSIRO.AU> From: ebiederm+eric@npwt.net (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 26 Jun 1998 09:16:14 -0500 In-Reply-To: Christoph Rohland's message of 26 Jun 1998 09:53:08 +0200 Message-ID: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Christoph Rohland Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" , linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: >>>>> "CR" == Christoph Rohland writes: CR> I do not agree: CR> 1) why should madvise only advise. O.K. it is a naming thing, but I CR> think you can find more terms which went far from the original CR> meaning. Because if it only advises, you can ignore it and return success. If it does more than advise you have to do much more error checking and error handling. If it turns out we want to give lots of advise in one syscall, instead of just one piece of advise, this could be important. CR> 2) Would not work on shared pages. Not perfectly. That does appear to be the achillies heel currently of madvise. Multiple users of the same memory. CR> 3) Why is IRIX more reasonable than any other implementation? Well IRIX also sync with the sun man page and my intuition. I am thinking in terms of swapping hints, and specific functionality doesn't fit into that category. CR> The functionality described in the OSF manpage greatly help CR> transactional programs, which use loads of memory for single CR> transactions. I do not know if it should be done with madvise, but CR> there is at least one OS which thinks it is the right place and I CR> would look for this functionality exactly there. I hadn't considered the transaction case. In fact I haven't considered most cases. That's partly why I'm still talking. But still there are other more portable methods to achieve a memory reset, as I mentioned earlier. And there isn't another even semi portable method to achieve swapping hints. Eric