MADV_DONTNEED Do not expect access in the near future. (For the time being, the application is finished with the given range, so the kernel can free resources associated with it.) After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics of memory access in the specified region are changed: subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but will result in either repopulating the memory contents from the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem-based techniques such as System V shared memory segments) or zero- fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private mappings. Note that, when applied to shared mappings, MADV_DONTNEED might not lead to immediate freeing of the pages in the range. The kernel is free to delay freeing the pages until an appropriate moment. The resident set size (RSS) of the calling process will be immediately reduced however. MADV_DONTNEED cannot be applied to locked pages, Huge TLB pages, or VM_PFNMAP pages. (Pages marked with the kernel- internal VM_PFNMAP flag are special memory areas that are not managed by the virtual memory subsystem. Such pages are typically created by device drivers that map the pages into user space.)