Locking memory is one of the most important issues for real-time applications. In a real-time environment, a process must be able to guarantee continuous memory residence to reduce latency and to prevent paging and swapping.
This section describes the memory locking mechanisms that are available to real-time applications in SunOS.
Under SunOS, the memory residency of a process is determined by its current state, the total available physical memory, the number of active processes, and the processes' demand for memory. This residency is appropriate in a time-share environment. This residency is often unacceptable for a real-time process. In a real-time environment, a process must guarantee a memory residence to reduce the process' memory access and dispatch latency.
Real-time memory locking in SunOS is provided by a set of library routines. These routines allow a process running with superuser privileges to lock specified portions of its virtual address space into physical memory. Pages locked in this manner are exempt from paging until the pages are unlocked or the process exits.
The operating system has a system-wide limit on the number of pages that can be locked at any time. This limit is a tunable parameter whose default value is calculated at boot time. The default value is based on the number of page frames minus another percentage, currently set at ten percent.