Each row in /proc/$PID/maps describes a region of contiguous virtual memory in a process or thread. Each row has the following fields:
1 | address perms offset dev inode pathname |
- address - This is the starting and ending address of the region in the process’s address space
- permissions - This describes how pages in the region can be accessed. There are four different permissions: read, write, execute, and shared. If read/write/execute are disabled, a ‘-‘ will appear instead of the ‘r’/‘w’/‘x’. If a region is not shared, it is private, so a ‘p’ will appear instead of an ‘s’. If the process attempts to access memory in a way that is not permitted, a segmentation fault is generated. Permissions can be changed using the mprotect system call.
- offset - If the region was mapped from a file (using mmap), this is the offset in the file where the mapping begins. If the memory was not mapped from a file, it’s just 0.
- device - If the region was mapped from a file, this is the major and minor device number (in hex) where the file lives.
- inode - If the region was mapped from a file, this is the file number.
- pathname - If the region was mapped from a file, this is the name of the file. This field is blank for anonymous mapped regions. There are also special regions with names like [heap], [stack], or [vdso]. [vdso] stands for virtual dynamic shared object. It’s used by system calls to switch to kernel mode.
You might notice a lot of anonymous regions. These are usually created by mmap but are not attached to any file. They are used for a lot of miscellaneous things like shared memory or buffers not allocated on the heap. For instance, I think the pthread library uses anonymous mapped regions as stacks for new threads.