It's now possible to get purgeable memory by using mmap(MAP_PURGEABLE).
Purgeable memory has a "volatile" flag that can be set using madvise():
- madvise(..., MADV_SET_VOLATILE)
- madvise(..., MADV_SET_NONVOLATILE)
When in the "volatile" state, the kernel may take away the underlying
physical memory pages at any time, without notifying the owner.
This gives you a guilt discount when caching very large things. :^)
Setting a purgeable region to non-volatile will return whether or not
the memory has been taken away by the kernel while being volatile.
Basically, if madvise(..., MADV_SET_NONVOLATILE) returns 1, that means
the memory was purged while volatile, and whatever was in that piece
of memory needs to be reconstructed before use.
