Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 17 Apr 1996 18:24:33 -0400 | From | "David S. Miller" <> | Subject | Re: Unices are created equal, but ... |
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From: "Ulrich Windl" <Ulrich.Windl@rz.uni-regensburg.de> Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 09:51:51 +0100
Isn't there a function madvise() to give the kernel some hints about the expected access patterns? These hints should somehow enter memory management structures so that the pager can take advantage of the hints...
madvise() is found under SunOS and Solaris (a working one that actually does something, that is) and this only works decently because of the segment driver structure of the Sun hat layer. The way it works is that when you take a fault, you call the segment driver specific fault handler to satisfy the request.
So you have something like a segment driver for anonymous pages, one for vfs pages, frame buffer device drivers and other devices can have segment drivers for mmap()'d devices etc.
With linux where everything is so snug and close together and integrated such a madvise() thing would be more harm than good and god-awful to maintain.
I would suggest if such a facility is needed than to implement it using a different interface.
Something like a per-process swap-method sounds like it would work. So my big scanning reasearcher code data-set program would use a chunking style of swapping and my interactive programs would use the current page-level vmscan method.
Comments?
Later, David S. Miller davem@caip.rutgers.edu
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