MLOCKALL(2)						     Linux Programmer's Manual						       MLOCKALL(2)

NAME

       mlockall - disable paging for calling process

SYNOPSIS

       #include <sys/mman.h>

       int mlockall(int flags);

DESCRIPTION

       mlockall  disables paging for all pages mapped into the address space of the calling process. This includes the pages of the code, data and
       stack segment, as well as shared libraries, user space kernel data, shared memory and memory mapped files. All mapped pages are	guaranteed
       to  be  resident  in  RAM  when	the  mlockall  system call returns successfully and they are guaranteed to stay in RAM until the pages are
       unlocked again by munlock or munlockall or until the process terminates or starts another  program  with  exec.	 Child	processes  do  not
       inherit page locks across a fork.

       Memory  locking has two main applications: real-time algorithms and high-security data processing. Real-time applications require determin-
       istic timing, and, like scheduling, paging is one major cause of unexpected program execution delays. Real-time applications  will  usually
       also  switch to a real-time scheduler with sched_setscheduler.  Cryptographic security software often handles critical bytes like passwords
       or secret keys as data structures. As a result of paging, these secrets could be transfered onto a persistent swap store medium, where they
       might  be accessible to the enemy long after the security software has erased the secrets in RAM and terminated. For security applications,
       only small parts of memory have to be locked, for which mlock is available.

       The flags parameter can be constructed from the bitwise OR of the following constants:

       MCL_CURRENT Lock all pages which are currently mapped into the address space of the process.

       MCL_FUTURE  Lock all pages which will become mapped into the address space of the process in the future. These could be	for  instance  new
		   pages required by a growing heap and stack as well as new memory mapped files or shared memory regions.

       If MCL_FUTURE has been specified and the number of locked pages exceeds the upper limit of allowed locked pages, then the system call which
       caused the new mapping will fail with ENOMEM.  If these new pages have been mapped by the the growing stack,  then  the	kernel	will  deny
       stack expansion and send a SIGSEGV.

       Real-time processes should reserve enough locked stack pages before entering the time-critical section, so that no page fault can be caused
       by function calls. This can be achieved by calling a function which has a sufficiently large automatic variable and  which  writes  to  the
       memory  occupied  by  this  large array in order to touch these stack pages. This way, enough pages will be mapped for the stack and can be
       locked into RAM. The dummy writes ensure that not even copy-on-write page faults can occur in the critical section.

       Memory locks do not stack, i.e., pages which have been locked several times by calls to mlockall or mlock will be unlocked by a single call
       to  munlockall.	 Pages	which  are  mapped to several locations or by several processes stay locked into RAM as long as they are locked at
       least at one location or by at least one process.

       On POSIX systems on which mlockall and munlockall are available, _POSIX_MEMLOCK is defined in <unistd.h>.

RETURN VALUE

       On success, mlockall returns zero.  On error, -1 is returned, errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

       ENOMEM The process tried to exceed the maximum number of allowed locked pages.

       EPERM  The calling process does not have appropriate privileges. Only root processes are allowed to lock pages.

       EINVAL Unknown flags were specified.

CONFORMING TO

       POSIX.1b, SVr4.	 SVr4 documents an additional EAGAIN error code.

SEE ALSO

       munlockall(2), mlock(2), munlock(2)

Linux 1.3.43							    1995-11-26							       MLOCKALL(2)