Using madvise with MADV_DONTNEED to release memory back to the kernel
is not sufficient to change the commit charge accounted against the
process on Linux. It is OK however, when overcommit is enabled or is
heuristic. However, when overcommit is restricted to a percentage of
memory setting the contents of /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory as 2, it
makes a difference since memory requests will fail. Hence, we do what
we do with secure exec binaries, which is to call mmap on the region
to be dropped with MAP_FIXED. This internally unmaps the pages in
question and reduces the amount of memory accounted against the
process.
Joseph Myers
Allan McRae
Roland McGrath
Siddhesh Poyarekar