mcavic - 8:25 pm on Jul 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

I don't think you can hide memory from the OS, because you probably need the OS's help to access it. But, you can allocate a specific amount up-front. And once you write to that memory (by initializing it with all zeros, for example) it can't be reclaimed by another process.

It could be swapped out, but that shouldn't happen along as the machine has enough memory. Unlike Windows, Linux uses all of the RAM before touching a significant amount of the swap space.

With the amount of RAM you're talking about, though, you could turn swapping off entirely.