Provided by: manpages-dev_3.15-1_all
mincore - determine whether pages are resident in memory
int mincore(void *addr, size_t length, unsigned char *vec);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
mincore(): _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
On success, mincore() returns zero. On error, -1 is returned, and
errno is set appropriately.
EAGAIN kernel is temporarily out of resources.
EFAULT vec points to an invalid address.
EINVAL addr is not a multiple of the page size.
ENOMEM length is greater than (TASK_SIZE - addr). (This could occur if
a negative value is specified for length, since that value will
be interpreted as a large unsigned integer.) In Linux 2.6.11
and earlier, the error EINVAL was returned for this condition.
ENOMEM addr to addr + length contained unmapped memory.
Available since Linux 2.3.99pre1 and glibc 2.2.
mincore() is not specified in POSIX.1-2001, and it is not available on
all Unix implementations.
Before kernel 2.6.21, mincore() did not return correct information for
MAP_PRIVATE mappings, or for non-linear mappings (established using
This page is part of release 3.15 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.