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A comment on Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Parent comment

Re:Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsys... by account42 on Thursday April 22, 2021 @04:26AM (#26900246)
> Unfortunately like a process there is no way for windows to request memory back from linux (besides killing the entire thing).

I have long thought it would make sense to add a way for the OS to ask processes to relinquish memory that they can do without. A lot of processes have memory that they use for caching which can safely be dropped but doing so when the memory is not needed elsewhere unnecessarily limits performance.

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Re:Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsys... by psd1 on Sunday April 25, 2021 @07:00AM (#26931834)
That would require the application to support it. Like, "got anything you can dealloc?" "Oh shoot, now you mention it..."

What exists already in the Windows VMM, and I assume other OSes VMMs, is a distinction between allocated and committed. That's likely to be the best that's realistically achievable. The win VMM also has a last-accessed strategy for paging to disk, and de-duplication of shared pages.

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