Interesting VM feature?

[mouschi@wi.rr.com]

(Please CC: me,)

Hi,

I've recently come across someone porting some code
from windows that trys to implement an efficient
memory pool using some VM tricks. I have no idea if
linux has an equivalent to this feature (described
below), and wouldn't know what to even search for to
find out.

What this mempool wants to do is to be able to
allocate a block of memory and tell the kernel which
pages from it can be outright discarded, instead of
swapped out when memory starts to get crowded. 

Now, from looking at mel's docs, it looks to me like
this would mean letting the application directly
mark pages clean. But it would also mean finding any
swapped out versions of this page and deallocating
them, otherwise if the page is discarded and then
used again, time would be wasted swapping in garbage.

I'm going to keep reading. If this is already
implemented, or if the efficiency gains would be
nil, somebody yell at me before I start crashing my
kernel with attempts at doing this myself. :-) It
seems so trivial after all...

Thanks,
Ted Kaminski