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SubjectRe: Removing an executable while it runs
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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