how can I detect whether a specific page is mapped in memory?

Question

I would like to detect whether or not a specific page has already been mapped in memory. The goal here is to be able to perform this check before calling mmap with a fixed memory address. The following code illustrates what happens in this case by default: mmap silently remaps the original memory pages.

#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  int page_size;
  void *ptr;
  page_size = getpagesize();
  ptr = mmap(0, 10 * page_size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
             MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, 0, 0);
  if (ptr == MAP_FAILED) {
    printf ("map1 failed\n");
    return 1;
  }
  ((int *)ptr)[0] = 0xdeadbeaf;
  ptr = mmap(ptr, 2 * page_size, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS | MAP_FIXED, 0, 0);
  if (ptr == MAP_FAILED) {
    printf ("map2 failed\n");
    return 1;
  }
  if (((int *)ptr)[0] != 0xdeadbeaf) {
    printf ("oops, data gone !\n");
  }
  return 0;
}

I understand that I could open and parse /proc/self/maps to figure out which memory range has been allocated and infer from that if I can safely request a specific memory range with mmap but I am looking for a proper API: is there such a thing ?

Answer 1

msync(addr, len, 0) and checking for ENOMEM seems to work (with a fairly superficial test).

Answer 2

This doesn't "remap" the memory, but creates another mapping at different address (since the one you give it is already taken, and it's treated as a hint anyway). The old one is still valid, you just lose the reference to it since you overwrite the ptr variable.

If you want to create multiple mappings to the same memory like that look into shm_open(2).

If you just want to check if address is mapped then the MAP_FIXED trick pointed out by @MerickOWA should work.

Edit 0:

You are right about MAP_FIXED, it doesn't help in this case. What you might try is mincore(2). One of the errors it returns is:

ENOMEMaddr to addr + length contained unmapped memory.