[Gllug] Pages marked as present but not mapped

[Adrian McMenamin]

On Wed, August 31, 2011 11:32 pm, Christian Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 05:29:32PM +0100, Adrian McMenamin wrote:


>> Would I be correct in saying/thinking, they are/could be, areas of the
>> process virtual memory that have been reserved for, say, more pages of
>> the
>> backing file to be read in, but that the file itself has not been read
>> in
>> - hence although the space is reserved, there is nothing in it and when
>> at
>> attempt is made to reference those addresses, the appropriate page the
>> address_space will be read in from backing store and a page table entry
>> fixed up.
>>
>
> Precisely. That is the whole essence of demand paging. In the case of mmap
> file, the data comes from file. In the case of virgin anonymouse memory,
> a zero filled page is used (no IO). In the case of already swapped out
> pages, the swap address is stored in the PTE as you've seen. The PTE
> neither
> swapped nor present are the virgin untouched pages, which will be zero
> filled
> on demand.
>
> As noted also by Nix, private mmap'ing a file will result in writes to the
> pages being written to swap, so it is possible for mmap pages to be
> associated
> with swap. This is for usually for initialized data from an executable or
> shared library.
>
> Christian
> --

Thanks. Got it now.

--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug