Obtaining starting adress of a page

Question

I want to obtain the beginning of a memory page, a page that contains a function.

In my case I try to achieve the page beginning of main function. Which lies in 0x400a80, I think it is in code section of memory. I would appreciate if you can verify whether it is true or not.

As far as I understood, adress 0x400a80 lies in a page.

When I show memory segments of my process with pmap, it shows a segment starting with 0x400000 with size 8K, and the next portion goes with 0x601000 with size 4K.

I want to obtain adress 0x400000 because it has the address of the main() function. How can I achieve starting adress of a page when I have an adress that resides in that page? Is there any built-in way to do in linux ?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 05 '20 at 14:05

Welcome to Unix & Linux StackExchange!

This question might have been better served by Stack Overflow, the StackExchange site dedicated to programming questions. But anyway...

In x86 architecture, a standard memory page is 4 KiB, or 0x1000 bytes. The memory pages start at address 0, and are allocated contiguously with no overlapping.

To find the starting address of a memory page:

beginning of page = memory address AND (NOT page size - 1)

So if you have address 0x400a80, the beginning of that page = 0x400a80 AND (NOT 0x000fff) = 0x400a80 AND 0xfff000 = 0x400000.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 06 '20 at 10:05

If you’re looking for the start of a page containing a memory location, you can use sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE) to retrieve the system’s page size, and round down to that:

  void *alloc;
  long pagesz;

  pagesz = sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE);
  printf("Default page size: %ld\n", pagesz);

  alloc = malloc(512 * 1024 * 1024);
  printf("512MiB allocated at %zx\n", alloc);
  printf("The corresponding page starts at %zx\n", (((off_t) alloc) / pagesz) * pagesz);

This can be misleading in circumstances where page sizes vary, e.g. when using huge mappings on Linux.

If you’re looking for the start of the address space allocation containing a memory location, I’m not aware of a portable way to do so. On Linux, the interface to retrieve mapping information is /proc/self/maps, so you’d need to open and parse that.

Obtaining starting adress of a page

2 Answers2