Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt

pagemap, from the userspace perspective
---------------------------------------

pagemap is a new (as of 2.6.25) set of interfaces in the kernel that allow
userspace programs to examine the page tables and related information by
reading files in /proc.

There are three components to pagemap:

 * /proc/pid/pagemap.  This file lets a userspace process find out which
   physical frame each virtual page is mapped to.  It contains one 64-bit
   value for each virtual page, containing the following data (from
   fs/proc/task_mmu.c, above pagemap_read):

    * Bits 0-54  page frame number (PFN) if present
    * Bits 0-4   swap type if swapped
    * Bits 5-54  swap offset if swapped
    * Bits 55-60 page shift (page size = 1<<page shift)
    * Bit  61    reserved for future use
    * Bit  62    page swapped
    * Bit  63    page present

   If the page is not present but in swap, then the PFN contains an
   encoding of the swap file number and the page's offset into the
   swap. Unmapped pages return a null PFN. This allows determining
   precisely which pages are mapped (or in swap) and comparing mapped
   pages between processes.

   Efficient users of this interface will use /proc/pid/maps to
   determine which areas of memory are actually mapped and llseek to
   skip over unmapped regions.

 * /proc/kpagecount.  This file contains a 64-bit count of the number of
   times each page is mapped, indexed by PFN.

 * /proc/kpageflags.  This file contains a 64-bit set of flags for each
   page, indexed by PFN.

   The flags are (from fs/proc/page.c, above kpageflags_read):

     0. LOCKED
     1. ERROR
     2. REFERENCED
     3. UPTODATE
     4. DIRTY
     5. LRU
     6. ACTIVE
     7. SLAB
     8. WRITEBACK
     9. RECLAIM
    10. BUDDY

Using pagemap to do something useful:

The general procedure for using pagemap to find out about a process' memory
usage goes like this:

 1. Read /proc/pid/maps to determine which parts of the memory space are
    mapped to what.
 2. Select the maps you are interested in -- all of them, or a particular
    library, or the stack or the heap, etc.
 3. Open /proc/pid/pagemap and seek to the pages you would like to examine.
 4. Read a u64 for each page from pagemap.
 5. Open /proc/kpagecount and/or /proc/kpageflags.  For each PFN you just
    read, seek to that entry in the file, and read the data you want.

For example, to find the "unique set size" (USS), which is the amount of
memory that a process is using that is not shared with any other process,
you can go through every map in the process, find the PFNs, look those up
in kpagecount, and tally up the number of pages that are only referenced
once.

Other notes:

Reading from any of the files will return -EINVAL if you are not starting
the read on an 8-byte boundary (e.g., if you seeked an odd number of bytes
into the file), or if the size of the read is not a multiple of 8 bytes.