mincore - determine whether pages are resident in memory

#include <sys/mman.h>
int mincore(void addr[.length], size_t length, unsigned char *vec);

Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):

    Since glibc 2.19:
        _DEFAULT_SOURCE
    glibc 2.19 and earlier:
        _BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE

mincore() returns a vector that indicates whether pages of the calling process's virtual memory are resident in core (RAM), and so will not cause a disk access (page fault) if referenced. The kernel returns residency information about the pages starting at the address addr, and continuing for length bytes.

The addr argument must be a multiple of the system page size. The length argument need not be a multiple of the page size, but since residency information is returned for whole pages, length is effectively rounded up to the next multiple of the page size. One may obtain the page size (PAGE_SIZE) using sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE).

The vec argument must point to an array containing at least (length+PAGE_SIZE-1) / PAGE_SIZE bytes. On return, the least significant bit of each byte will be set if the corresponding page is currently resident in memory, and be clear otherwise. (The settings of the other bits in each byte are undefined; these bits are reserved for possible later use.) Of course the information returned in vec is only a snapshot: pages that are not locked in memory can come and go at any moment, and the contents of vec may already be stale by the time this call returns.

On success, mincore() returns zero. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.

fincore(1), madvise(2), mlock(2), mmap(2), posix_fadvise(2), posix_madvise(3)