Understanding Linux /proc/id/maps

Question

I am trying to understand my embedded Linux application's memory use. The /proc/pid/maps utility/file seems to be a good resource for seeing the details. Unfortunately I don't understand all the columns and entries.

What does the anonymous inode 0 entries mean? These seem to be some of the larger memory segments.

Answer 1

Each row in /proc/$PID/maps describes a region of contiguous virtual memory in a process or thread. Each row has the following fields:

address           perms offset  dev   inode   pathname
08048000-08056000 r-xp 00000000 03:0c 64593   /usr/sbin/gpm

• 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. Here's a good article about it: "What is linux-gate.so.1?"

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.