Locking a Page

A call to mlock(3C) requests that one segment of memory be locked into the system's physical memory. The pages that make up the specified segment are faulted in and the lock count of each is incremented. Any page with a lock count greater than 0 is exempt from paging activity.

A particular page can be locked multiple times by multiple processes through different mappings. If two different processes lock the same page, the page remains locked until both processes remove their locks. However, within a given mapping, page locks do not nest. Multiple calls of locking functions on the same address by the same process are removed by a single unlock request.

If the mapping through which a lock has been performed is removed, the memory segment is implicitly unlocked. When a page is deleted through closing or truncating the file, it is also unlocked implicitly.

Locks are not inherited by a child process after a fork(2) call is made. So, if a process with memory locked forks a child, the child must perform a memory locking operation in its own behalf to lock its own pages. Otherwise, the child process incurs copy-on-write page faults, which are the usual penalties associated with forking a process.