It doesn't. It would only mark free'd pages as disposable.
Pages that the application is not supposed to use anyway.
Of course, I'm not quite sure how much better this would be compared to having
a malloc library that returns unused pages to the OS. Maybe the `return unused
page + realloc a page' would be noticeably more expensive than just `mark
disposable' ?
> Also - how does this differ from above, assuming here libc catches
> ENONMEM and free's the 'disposable mappings' itself?
Well, disposing of disposable pages can be done without application involvement
(at the OOM time) which makes a big difference since when you're out of memory,
your application's ENOMEM handler would probably fail.
Stefan
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