NAME
mlockall,
munlockall
- lock (unlock) the address space of a process
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
int
mlockall(
int flags
)
int
munlockall(
void
)
DESCRIPTION
The
mlockall
system call locks into memory the physical pages associated with the
address space of a process until the address space is unlocked, the
process exits, or execs another program image.
The following flags affect the behavior of
mlockall:
MCL_CURRENT
-
Lock all pages currently mapped into the process's address space.
MCL_FUTURE
-
Lock all pages mapped into the process's address space in the future,
at the time the mapping is established.
Note that this may cause future mappings to fail if those mappings
cause resource limits to be exceeded.
Since physical memory is a potentially scarce resource, processes are
limited in how much they can lock down.
A single process can lock the minimum of a system-wide
``wired pages''
limit and the per-process
RLIMIT_MEMLOCK
resource limit.
The
munlockall
call unlocks any locked memory regions in the process address space.
Any regions mapped after an
munlockall
call will not be locked.
RETURN VALUES
A return value of 0 indicates that the call
succeeded and all pages in the range have either been locked or unlocked.
A return value of -1 indicates an error occurred and the locked
status of all pages in the range remains unchanged.
In this case, the global location
errno
is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
mlockall(
)
will fail if:
- [
EINVAL
] -
The
flags
argument is zero, or includes unimplemented flags.
- [
ENOMEM
] -
Locking the indicated range would exceed either the system or per-process
limit for locked memory.
- [
EAGAIN
] -
Some or all of the memory mapped into the process's address space
could not be locked when the call was made.
- [
EPERM
] -
The calling process does not have the appropriate privilege to perform
the requested operation.
SEE ALSO
mincore(2),
mlock(2),
mmap(2),
munmap(2),
setrlimit(2)
STANDARDS
The
mlockall(
)
and
munlockall(
)
functions conform to
IEEE Std 1003.1b-1993 (``POSIX.1'') .
HISTORY
The
mlockall(
)
and
munlockall(
)
functions first appeared in
NetBSD1.5.
BUGS
The per-process resource limit is a limit on the amount of virtual
memory locked, while the system-wide limit is for the number of locked
physical pages.
Hence a process with two distinct locked mappings of the same physical page
counts as 2 pages against the per-process limit and as only a single page
in the system limit.