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Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 15:00:13 -0500
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From: "Christopher Friesen" <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com>
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To: Brian Gerst <bgerst@didntduck.org>
Cc: Cyrille Beraud <cyrille.beraud@savoirfairelinux.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Removing an executable while it runs
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Brian Gerst wrote:
> 
> Cyrille Beraud wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> > I would like to remove an executable from the file-system while it is
> > running and
> > get all the blocks back immediately, not after the end of the program.
> > Is this possible ?
> >  From what I understand, the inode is not released until the program
> > ends. Do all the
> > file-systems behave the same way ?
> >
> > Thank you for your help.
> 
> It is not possible to reclaim the disk space until the program exits.
> This is because of demand paging of executables.  The file must be kept
> around to handle possible future page faults, otherwise the program
> would crash if it called code that hadn't been loaded yet or was
> discarded due to memory pressure.  This is true of all filesystems.

Couldn't you use mlockall() to ensure that demand paging is not a factor?  Then
you should be able to free up the disk space since the actual application is
guaranteed to be in ram.

Chris

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