madvise(2)
- NetBSD Manual Pages
MADVISE(2) NetBSD System Calls Manual MADVISE(2)
NAME
madvise -- give advice about use of memory
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/mman.h>
int
madvise(void *addr, size_t len, int behav);
int
posix_madvise(void *addr, size_t len, int advice);
DESCRIPTION
The madvise() system call allows a process that has knowledge of its mem-
ory behavior to describe it to the system. The posix_madvise() interface
is identical and is provided for standards conformance.
The known behaviors are:
MADV_NORMAL Tells the system to revert to the default paging behavior.
MADV_RANDOM Is a hint that pages will be accessed randomly, and
prefetching is likely not advantageous.
MADV_SEQUENTIAL
Causes the VM system to depress the priority of pages imme-
diately preceding a given page when it is faulted in.
MADV_WILLNEED
Causes pages that are in a given virtual address range to
temporarily have higher priority, and if they are in memory,
decrease the likelihood of them being freed. Additionally,
the pages that are already in memory will be immediately
mapped into the process, thereby eliminating unnecessary
overhead of going through the entire process of faulting the
pages in. This WILL NOT fault pages in from backing store,
but quickly map the pages already in memory into the calling
process.
MADV_DONTNEED
Allows the VM system to decrease the in-memory priority of
pages in the specified range. Additionally future refer-
ences to this address range will incur a page fault.
MADV_FREE Gives the VM system the freedom to free pages, and tells the
system that information in the specified page range is no
longer important.
Portable programs that call the posix_madvise() interface should use the
aliases POSIX_MADV_NORMAL, POSIX_MADV_SEQUENTIAL, POSIX_MADV_RANDOM,
POSIX_MADV_WILLNEED, and POSIX_MADV_DONTNEED rather than the flags
described above.
RETURN VALUES
Upon successful completion, a value of 0 is returned. Otherwise, a value
of -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
madvise() will fail if:
[EINVAL] Invalid parameters were provided.
SEE ALSO
mincore(2), mprotect(2), msync(2), munmap(2), posix_fadvise(2)
STANDARDS
The posix_madvise() system call is expected to conform to the IEEE Std
1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'') standard.
HISTORY
The madvise system call first appeared in 4.4BSD, but until NetBSD 1.5 it
did not perform any of the requests on, or change any behavior of the
address range given. The posix_madvise() was invented in NetBSD 5.0.
NetBSD 5.1.5 April 19, 2008 NetBSD 5.1.5
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