process_madvise(2) — Linux manual page

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

process_madvise(2)         System Calls Manual         process_madvise(2)

NAME         top

       process_madvise - give advice about use of memory to a process

LIBRARY         top

       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <sys/mman.h>

       ssize_t process_madvise(int pidfd, const struct iovec iovec[.n],
                               size_t n, int advice, unsigned int flags);

DESCRIPTION         top

       The process_madvise() system call is used to give advice or
       directions to the kernel about the address ranges of another
       process or of the calling process.  It provides the advice for the
       address ranges described by iovec and n.  The goal of such advice
       is to improve system or application performance.

       The pidfd argument is a PID file descriptor (see pidfd_open(2))
       that specifies the process to which the advice is to be applied.

       The pointer iovec points to an array of iovec structures,
       described in iovec(3type).

       n specifies the number of elements in the array of iovec
       structures.  This value must be less than or equal to IOV_MAX
       (defined in <limits.h> or accessible via the call
       sysconf(_SC_IOV_MAX)).

       If manipulating another process, or before Linux 6.13, the advice
       argument is one of the following values:

       MADV_COLD
              See madvise(2).

       MADV_COLLAPSE
              See madvise(2).

       MADV_PAGEOUT
              See madvise(2).

       MADV_WILLNEED
              See madvise(2).

       Since Linux 6.13, when manipulating the calling process, any
       advice flag is permitted.

       The flags argument is reserved for future use; currently, this
       argument must be specified as 0.

       The n and iovec arguments are checked before applying any advice.
       If n is too big, or iovec is invalid, then an error will be
       returned immediately and no advice will be applied.

       The advice might be applied to only a part of iovec if one of its
       elements points to an invalid memory region in the remote process.
       No further elements will be processed beyond that point.  (See the
       discussion regarding partial advice in RETURN VALUE.)

       Since Linux 5.12, permission to apply advice to another process is
       governed by ptrace access mode PTRACE_MODE_READ_FSCREDS check (see
       ptrace(2)); in addition, because of the performance implications
       of applying the advice, the caller must have the CAP_SYS_NICE
       capability (see capabilities(7)).

RETURN VALUE         top

       On success, process_madvise() returns the number of bytes advised.
       This return value may be less than the total number of requested
       bytes, if an error occurred after some iovec elements were already
       processed.  The caller should check the return value to determine
       whether a partial advice occurred.

       On error, -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS         top

       EBADF  pidfd is not a valid PID file descriptor.

       EFAULT The memory described by iovec is outside the accessible
              address space of the process referred to by pidfd.

       EINVAL flags is not 0.

       EINVAL The sum of the iov_len values of iovec overflows a ssize_t
              value.

       EINVAL n is too large.

       ENOMEM Could not allocate memory for internal copies of the iovec
              structures.

       EPERM  The caller does not have permission to access the address
              space of the process pidfd.

       ESRCH  The target process does not exist (i.e., it has terminated
              and been waited on).

       See madvise(2) for advice-specific errors.

STANDARDS         top

       Linux.

HISTORY         top

       Linux 5.10.  glibc 2.36.

       Support for this system call is optional, depending on the setting
       of the CONFIG_ADVISE_SYSCALLS configuration option.

       When this system call first appeared in Linux 5.10, permission to
       apply advice to another process was entirely governed by ptrace
       access mode PTRACE_MODE_ATTACH_FSCREDS check (see ptrace(2)).
       This requirement was relaxed in Linux 5.12 so that the caller
       didn't require full control over the target process.

SEE ALSO         top

       madvise(2), pidfd_open(2), process_vm_readv(2),
       process_vm_write(2)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.10.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2025-02-02.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

Linux man-pages 6.10            2024-12-04             process_madvise(2)

Pages that refer to this page: madvise(2)pidfd_open(2)syscalls(2)iovec(3type)