6 ms·

madvise() MADV_DONTNEED allows this - http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/madvise.2.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/madvise.2.html It's also a flag

• dezgeg 12y ago
  malloc() and free() is what I meant by "standard memory allocation functions". I'd say program that is in the position to use madvise() effectively has implemented it's own heap allocator. Also, MADV_DONTNEED is only usable in some specific situations, like caches. I don't see how it could be used to implement things like "on low memory, trigger garbage collection and trim the heap to the smallest possible with munmap()".
  • jbert 12y ago
    You said: "In other words, it's just wouldn't be practically possible to create an application that uses standard memory allocation functions and reliably can free some memory back to the kernel." So I thought you'd be interested to know that you can do just this with the standard functions mmap() and madvise(). No, it's not a replacement for malloc/free, but it does have value to some applications for some use cases.