DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

MLOCK(2)                 DragonFly System Calls Manual                MLOCK(2)

NAME
     mlock, munlock -- lock (unlock) physical pages in memory

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <sys/types.h>
     #include <sys/mman.h>

     int
     mlock(const void *addr, size_t len);

     int
     munlock(const void *addr, size_t len);

DESCRIPTION
     The mlock() system call locks into memory the physical pages associated
     with the virtual address range starting at addr for len bytes.  The
     munlock() call unlocks pages previously locked by one or more mlock()
     calls.  For both, the addr parameter should be aligned to a multiple of
     the page size.  If the len parameter is not a multiple of the page size,
     it will be rounded up to be so.  The entire range must be allocated.

     After an mlock() call, the indicated pages will cause neither a non-resi-
     dent page nor address-translation fault until they are unlocked.  They
     may still cause protection-violation faults or TLB-miss faults on archi-
     tectures with software-managed TLBs.  The physical pages remain in memory
     until all locked mappings for the pages are removed.  Multiple processes
     may have the same physical pages locked via their own virtual address
     mappings.  A single process may likewise have pages multiply-locked via
     different virtual mappings of the same pages or via nested mlock() calls
     on the same address range.  Unlocking is performed explicitly by
     munlock() or implicitly by a call to munmap() which deallocates the
     unmapped address range.  Locked mappings are not inherited by the child
     process after a fork(2).

     Since physical memory is a potentially scarce resource, processes are
     limited in how much they can lock down.  A single process can mlock() the
     minimum of a system-wide ``wired pages'' limit and the per-process
     RLIMIT_MEMLOCK resource limit.

     These calls are only available to the super-user.

RETURN VALUES
     Upon successful completion, the value 0 is returned; otherwise the
     value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the
     error.

     If the call succeeds, all pages in the range become locked (unlocked);
     otherwise the locked status of all pages in the range remains unchanged.

ERRORS
     Mlock() will fail if:

     [EPERM]            The caller is not the super-user.

     [EINVAL]           The address given is not page aligned or the length is
                        negative.

     [EAGAIN]           Locking the indicated range would exceed either the
                        system or per-process limit for locked memory.

     [ENOMEM]           Some portion of the indicated address range is not
                        allocated.  There was an error faulting/mapping a
                        page.
     Munlock() will fail if:

     [EPERM]            The caller is not the super-user.

     [EINVAL]           The address given is not page aligned or the length is
                        negative.

     [ENOMEM]           Some portion of the indicated address range is not
                        allocated.  Some portion of the indicated address
                        range is not locked.

SEE ALSO
     fork(2), mincore(2), minherit(2), mmap(2), munmap(2), setrlimit(2),
     getpagesize(3)

HISTORY
     The mlock() and munlock() functions first appeared in 4.4BSD.

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.

     The per-process resource limit is not currently supported.

DragonFly 3.5                    May 18, 2004                    DragonFly 3.5