Accessing foreign memory that already exists

[Antoine Chambille]

Hi everyone,

At ActiveViam we are watching the foreign memory project with eager
anticipation. Thank you for the hard work, looking forward to it!

One question related to our usage of off-heap memory:

If some native memory already exists, what is the preferred way to expose
it as a memory segment?


Some details about our use case: we make an in-memory database that
delivers interactive queries to many users on terabyte datasets. The
database structures are allocated off-heap, but not with malloc which is a
bottleneck. We developed a highly concurrent, NUMA-Aware SLAB allocator.
This custom memory manager is written almost entirely in Java with just a
few system calls (anonymous mmap, munmap, madvise).

Cheers,
-Antoine