Many more words on volatile ranges

John Stultz continues to push the volatile ranges feature toward the kernel mainline. Volatile ranges allow web browsers and similar applications that cache large amounts of data to advise the kernel that the pages containing that data can be discarded if the system is under memory pressure. John's latest iteration of the patches is accompanied by a lengthy description of the current state of the implementation, open questions, and recent changes to the user-space API. The ensuing conversation prompted Minchan Kim to propose a patch set of his own that supports a similar feature for anonymous mappings, with a different use case in mind.

Click below (subscribers only) for a full report on both approaches.

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