FreeBSD Man Pages

munlock(2)

NAME

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

LIBRARY

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

     #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() system call unlocks pages previously locked by one or more
     mlock() calls.  For both, the addr argument should be aligned to a multi-
     ple of the page size.  If the len argument is not a multiple of the page
     size, it will be rounded up to be so.  The entire range must be allo-
     cated.

     After an mlock() system call, the indicated pages will cause neither a
     non-resident page nor address-translation fault until they are unlocked.
     They may still cause protection-violation faults or TLB-miss faults on
     architectures 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 explic-
     itly 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

     The mlock() system call will fail if:

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

			page.
     The munlock() system call 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.

SEE ALSO

     fork(2), mincore(2), minherit(2), mlockall(2), mmap(2), munlockall(2),
     munmap(2), setrlimit(2), getpagesize(3)

BUGS

     Allocating too much wired memory can lead to a memory-allocation deadlock
     which requires a reboot to recover from.

     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.

HISTORY

     The mlock() and munlock() system calls first appeared in 4.4BSD.

FreeBSD 5.4			August 10, 2004 		   FreeBSD 5.4

SPONSORED LINKS