Only in 2.6.5-aa5: nonlinear-can-do-mlock Avoid truncate vs nonlinear BUG mentioned by Hugh Dickins on l-k. Give nonlinear only to privilegied users that knows how to avoid breaking the kernel. If local security doesn't matter disable-cap-mlock can be enabled and it'll give mlock and remap-file-pages too to every user. truncate must be fixed anyways to increase the strength of disable-cap-mlock but it gets low priority after moving the thing under sysctl, and I plan to keep the nonlinear hack forever under the sysctl for VM robusteness in providing _fair_ swapping to all processes. BTW, the mmap(MAP_POPULATE) API is horrible, there's no way to catch a failure with it, it doesn't return any retval, and I cannot fix it in my tree or I become ABI/API incompatible with linux 2.6, that's just a broken API that wants to be fixed properly in mainline despite the break of backwards compatibility.