• cooperating with the VM when memory pressure increases

• notify user applications of virtual memory events via real-time signals

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/bookmarking-collector/, and discussion at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2391 and http://marc.info/?t=113269321800003&r=1&w=2.

Found this via http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4094#comment-62100, which was linked from LWN.

From a quick glance, this sounds to me quite a bit like mechanisms also found in (originating in?) Mach's external pager mechanism. May be worth having a look at it.

IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2013-03-06

<braunr> tschwinge: from a quick look, this isn't similar to the external
  pager mechanism
<braunr> it's an additional tool to help userspace application manage
  internal caches
<braunr> it's similar to what is done to reclaim memory from the slab
  allocator for example
<braunr> and it would indeed be a very good thing to have so that e.g. the
  hurd can build a distributed but completely dynamic dentry-like cache
<braunr> i'm actually glad to see someone else thought of using real time
  signals for this
<braunr> i didn't do any research on that subject yet