[[!template id=project

title="Locking pages into memory, redux"

contact="""
[tech-kern](mailto:tech-kern@NetBSD.org)
"""

category="kernel"
difficulty="medium"
duration="1-2 months"

description="""
The mlock() system call locks pages in memory; however, it's meant for
real-time applications that wish to avoid _pageins_.

There's a second class of applications that want to lock pages in
memory: databases and anything else doing journaling, logging, or
ordered writes of any sort want to lock pages in memory to avoid
_pageouts_.
That is, it should be possible to lock a (dirty) page in memory so
that it does not get written out until after it's unlocked.

It is a bad idea to try to make mlock() serve this purpose as well as
the purpose it already serves, so add a new call, perhaps mlockin(),
and implement support in UVM.

Then for extra credit ram it through POSIX and make Linux implement it :-)
"""
]]