Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt: describe /proc/<pid>/map_files

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweaks]
Signed-off-by: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Calvin Owens <calvinowens@fb.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 23 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
index aae9dd13c91f..6d59ffe791ad 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@ Table of Contents
   3.6   /proc/<pid>/comm  & /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/comm
   3.7   /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
   3.8   /proc/<pid>/fdinfo/<fd> - Information about opened file
+  3.9   /proc/<pid>/map_files - Information about memory mapped files
 
   4     Configuring procfs
   4.1   Mount options
@@ -1763,6 +1764,28 @@ pair provide additional information particular to the objects they represent.
         with TIMER_ABSTIME option which will be shown in 'settime flags', but 'it_value'
         still exhibits timer's remaining time.
 
+3.9     /proc/<pid>/map_files - Information about memory mapped files
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+This directory contains symbolic links which represent memory mapped files
+the process is maintaining.  Example output:
+
+     | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 333c600000-333c620000 -> /usr/lib64/ld-2.18.so
+     | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 333c81f000-333c820000 -> /usr/lib64/ld-2.18.so
+     | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 333c820000-333c821000 -> /usr/lib64/ld-2.18.so
+     | ...
+     | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 35d0421000-35d0422000 -> /usr/lib64/libselinux.so.1
+     | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 400000-41a000 -> /usr/bin/ls
+
+The name of a link represents the virtual memory bounds of a mapping, i.e.
+vm_area_struct::vm_start-vm_area_struct::vm_end.
+
+The main purpose of the map_files is to retrieve a set of memory mapped
+files in a fast way instead of parsing /proc/<pid>/maps or
+/proc/<pid>/smaps, both of which contain many more records.  At the same
+time one can open(2) mappings from the listings of two processes and
+comparing their inode numbers to figure out which anonymous memory areas
+are actually shared.
+
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 Configuring procfs
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