What's the status of the MADV_USERFAULT flag in madvise()?

Question

There have been some discussions to use a new flag in madvise() to tell the kernel not to handle page faults in certain memory ranges: lwn.net-1, lwn.net-2

As far as I am able to see, this flag hasn't found its way to the kernel source.

What's the current status of this work?

Infralapsarian

Don't know exactly, but see this answer to a perhaps related question – Maag

Thanks for the pointer (even though it does not fully answer the question). I think I will try running this patch and see how it goes. – Infralapsarian

Answer 1

The community never went forward with MADV_USERFAULT. Instead, a more robust solution called userfaultfd has made its way into the kernel. https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/userfaultfd.txt

Twaddle