* William Case <billlinux [ at ] rogers [ dot ] com> [071003 10:45]: > I understand, that in reality, addresses for processes and parts of > processes can be almost anywhere in RAM. But there is an organizing > process that takes place in VM. Manuals and texts make reference to > fixed locations for things like BIOS code. Others show programs as > being at a base address with consecutive lines of code being offset. I > would like to see how all of this gets represented in a organized > logical fashion on a running machine. On x86 we have this legacy crap shoot called the BIOS. It's horrible and disgusting, and it ain't going away. Here is what the simple layout looks like... http://www.osdata.com/system/physical/memmap.htm ... but since the early nighties (when the above was everything you needed to know) it's gotten worse. Now USB, ACPI, ATA, VIDEO, and other parts of the BIOS reserve various regions. INT 0x15, service 0xE820, was added for OS software to get the layout of usable memory on the system. This will list about 5 regions reserved to different parts of the BIOS. It also lists the physical memory regions that the OS can use for whatever it wants. Some of the physical address regions will be listed in /proc/iomem. > I know I can get addresses etc. with self-written C programs. I was > just wondering if there exits a nice little gui program (but command > line will do) that shows me where (at what addresses) different things > are being stored. When you write C programs on an OS, you will be executing in virtual memory. Which has nothing to do with physical layout. Each 32bit application gets 4G of memory space to play with, even if there isn't that much actual memory available. > first and last address of my memory, > BIOS that has been written to memory, > Kernel space, > User space, > shell, > processes (running and sleeping), The above is not how you want to look at things. User space runs in virtual memory, which is seldom contiguous in physical memory. So you can exclude all of that. You need to get a book on memory architecture (or read the recent article series at LWN http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/). > I would like to see start and end addresses for the above. > I would probably only look one or two times and then be content. > I tried to cat /sys/* and cat /proc/* but couldn't find anything useful, > but that doesn't mean its not there. If you're interested in one application's virtual memory maps you can look at /proc/$$/smaps, where $$ could be any replaced with pid. -Bart -- WebSig: http://www.jukie.net/~bart/sig/