posix_madvise - give advice about patterns of memory usage
Contents
Description
The posix_madvise() function allows an application to advise the system about its expected patterns of
usage of memory in the address range starting at addr and continuing for len bytes. The system is free
to use this advice in order to improve the performance of memory accesses (or to ignore the advice
altogether), but calling posix_madvise() shall not affect the semantics of access to memory in the
specified range.
The advice argument is one of the following:
POSIX_MADV_NORMAL
The application has no special advice regarding its memory usage patterns for the specified
address range. This is the default behavior.
POSIX_MADV_SEQUENTIAL
The application expects to access the specified address range sequentially, running from lower
addresses to higher addresses. Hence, pages in this region can be aggressively read ahead, and
may be freed soon after they are accessed.
POSIX_MADV_RANDOM
The application expects to access the specified address range randomly. Thus, read ahead may be
less useful than normally.
POSIX_MADV_WILLNEED
The application expects to access the specified address range in the near future. Thus, read
ahead may be beneficial.
POSIX_MADV_DONTNEED
The application expects that it will not access the specified address range in the near future.
Errors
EINVALaddr is not a multiple of the system page size or len is negative.
EINVALadvice is invalid.
ENOMEM Addresses in the specified range are partially or completely outside the caller's address space.
History
glibc 2.2. POSIX.1-2001.
Library
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
Name
posix_madvise - give advice about patterns of memory usage
Return Value
On success, posix_madvise() returns 0. On failure, it returns a positive error number.
See Also
madvise(2), posix_fadvise(2) Linux man-pages 6.9.1 2024-05-02 posix_madvise(3)
Standards
POSIX.1-2008.
Synopsis
#include<sys/mman.h>intposix_madvise(voidaddr[.len],size_tlen,intadvice);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
posix_madvise():
_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L
Versions
POSIX.1 permits an implementation to generate an error if len is 0. On Linux, specifying len as 0 is
permitted (as a successful no-op).
In glibc, this function is implemented using madvise(2). However, since glibc 2.6, POSIX_MADV_DONTNEED
is treated as a no-op, because the corresponding madvise(2) value, MADV_DONTNEED, has destructive
semantics.
