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Chapter 5. Increasing the amount of memory that users are allowed to pin in the system

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Remote direct memory access (RDMA) operations require the pinning of physical memory. As a consequence, the kernel is not allowed to write memory into the swap space. If a user pins too much memory, the system can run out of memory, and the kernel terminates processes to free up more memory. Therefore, memory pinning is a privileged operation.

If non-root users need to run large RDMA applications, it is necessary to increase the amount of memory to maintain pages in primary memory pinned all the time.

Procedure

  • As the root user, create the file /etc/security/limits.conf with the following contents:

    @rdma soft memlock unlimited
    @rdma hard memlock unlimited

Verification

  1. Log in as a member of the rdma group after editing the /etc/security/limits.conf file.

    Note that Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies updated ulimit settings when the user logs in.

  2. Use the ulimit -l command to display the limit:

    $ ulimit -l
    unlimited

    If the command returns unlimited, the user can pin an unlimited amount of memory.

Additional resources

  • limits.conf(5) man page on your system
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