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Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors .\" may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software .\" without specific prior written permission. .\" .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND .\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE .\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE .\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL .\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS .\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) .\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT .\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY .\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF .\" SUCH DAMAGE. .\" .\" @(#)mlock.2 8.2 (Berkeley) 12/11/93 .\" .Dd May 13, 2019 .Dt MLOCK 2 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm mlock , .Nm munlock .Nd lock (unlock) physical pages in memory .Sh LIBRARY .Lb libc .Sh SYNOPSIS .In sys/mman.h .Ft int .Fn mlock "const void *addr" "size_t len" .Ft int .Fn munlock "const void *addr" "size_t len" .Sh DESCRIPTION The .Fn mlock system call locks into memory the physical pages associated with the virtual address range starting at .Fa addr for .Fa len bytes. The .Fn munlock system call unlocks pages previously locked by one or more .Fn mlock calls. For both, the .Fa addr argument should be aligned to a multiple of the page size. If the .Fa len argument is not a multiple of the page size, it will be rounded up to be so. The entire range must be allocated. .Pp After an .Fn mlock system call, the indicated pages will cause neither a non-resident page nor address-translation fault until they are unlocked. They may still cause protection-violation faults or TLB-miss faults on architectures with software-managed TLBs. The physical pages remain in memory until all locked mappings for the pages are removed. Multiple processes may have the same physical pages locked via their own virtual address mappings. A single process may likewise have pages multiply-locked via different virtual mappings of the same physical pages. Unlocking is performed explicitly by .Fn munlock or implicitly by a call to .Fn munmap which deallocates the unmapped address range. Locked mappings are not inherited by the child process after a .Xr fork 2 . .Pp Since physical memory is a potentially scarce resource, processes are limited in how much they can lock down. The amount of memory that a single process can .Fn mlock is limited by both the per-process .Dv RLIMIT_MEMLOCK resource limit and the system-wide .Dq wired pages limit .Va vm.max_user_wired . .Va vm.max_user_wired applies to the system as a whole, so the amount available to a single process at any given time is the difference between .Va vm.max_user_wired and .Va vm.stats.vm.v_user_wire_count . .Pp If .Va security.bsd.unprivileged_mlock is set to 0 these calls are only available to the super-user. .Sh RETURN VALUES .Rv -std .Pp If the call succeeds, all pages in the range become locked (unlocked); otherwise the locked status of all pages in the range remains unchanged. .Sh ERRORS The .Fn mlock system call will fail if: .Bl -tag -width Er .It Bq Er EPERM .Va security.bsd.unprivileged_mlock is set to 0 and the caller is not the super-user. .It Bq Er EINVAL The address range given wraps around zero. .It Bq Er ENOMEM Some portion of the indicated address range is not allocated. There was an error faulting/mapping a page. Locking the indicated range would exceed the per-process or system-wide limits for locked memory. .El The .Fn munlock system call will fail if: .Bl -tag -width Er .It Bq Er EPERM .Va security.bsd.unprivileged_mlock is set to 0 and the caller is not the super-user. .It Bq Er EINVAL The address range given wraps around zero. .It Bq Er ENOMEM Some or all of the address range specified by the addr and len arguments does not correspond to valid mapped pages in the address space of the process. .It Bq Er ENOMEM Locking the pages mapped by the specified range would exceed a limit on the amount of memory that the process may lock. .El .Sh "SEE ALSO" .Xr fork 2 , .Xr mincore 2 , .Xr minherit 2 , .Xr mlockall 2 , .Xr mmap 2 , .Xr munlockall 2 , .Xr munmap 2 , .Xr setrlimit 2 , .Xr getpagesize 3 .Sh HISTORY The .Fn mlock and .Fn munlock system calls first appeared in .Bx 4.4 . .Sh BUGS Allocating too much wired memory can lead to a memory-allocation deadlock which requires a reboot to recover from. .Pp The per-process and system-wide resource limits of locked memory apply to the amount of virtual memory locked, not the amount of locked physical pages. Hence two distinct locked mappings of the same physical page counts as 2 pages aginst the system limit, and also against the per-process limit if both mappings belong to the same physical map. .Pp The per-process resource limit is not currently supported.