How's that so? An app doesn't have to leak OS memory, just leak its own memory.
It's unsafe for the kernel to swap the memory out, because paging doesn't (usually) work while running kernel code.
It might be called "non-pageable", "pinned", "non-swappable", etc. Out of those, I'd prefer "non-pageable", because it's the most descriptive term for it.
Non-standard terminology is not great for communication.
For what OS? Consider https://wiki.freebsd.org/Memory
Wired
- Non-pageable memory: cannot be freed until explicitly released by the owner
- Userland memory can be wired by mlock(2) (subject to system and per-user limits)
- Kernel memory allocators return wired memory
- Contents of the ARC and the buffer cache are wired
- Some memory is permanently wired and is never freed (e.g., the kernel file itself)
Check my other reply above. Did some FreeBSD work ~15 years ago, but I guess I'd already forgotten.
Really ? Because it's literally called that in macOS Activity Monitor app, the term is also used in Apple's kernel documentation and API's (e.g. in the `mem_and_io_snapshot` struct defined in 'debug.h' in Kernel.framework). It's also mentioned in the Kernel Programming Guide.
Never did macOS drivers, just bare metal, Windows and Linux so far, macOS is not very big in our niche. Weird that Apple's terminology is so different.
Typing this on a Macbook Pro, and I can see that Activity Monitor does mention "wired" memory.