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How can I find out how big a Linux process's page table is, along with any other variable-size process accounting?
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Kernel page table. The kernel uses a separate page table to manage the page-table-mapped kernel segment. In contrast to user space, where there is one page table per process, this page table belongs to the kernel and is in effect independent of which process is running.
The page table of the process is held in the kernel space. The kernel may have several page tables in RAM, but only one is the active page table. In x86 CPUs, it's the page table pointed by register CR3.
A page table is the data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer operating system to store the mapping between virtual addresses and physical addresses.
Page table translates from virtual to physical page addresses. Since each process has its own virtual address space and usually maps the same virtual address to a different physical address it needs a separate page table. Curiously, multiple processes may map different virtual addresses to the same physical memory.
If you are really interested in the page tables, do a
$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep PageTables
PageTables: 24496 kB
Since Linux 2.6.10, the amount of memory used by a single process' page tables has been exposed via the VmPTE field of /proc/<pid>/status.
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Not sure about Linux, but most UNIX variants provide sysctl(3) for this purpose. There is also the sysctl(8) command line utility.
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Hmmm, back in Ye Olden Tymes, we used to call nlist(3) to get the system address for the data we were interested in, then open /dev/kmem, seek to the address, then read the data. Not sure if this works in Linux, but it might be worth typing "man 3 nlist" and seeing what comes back.
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