/proc/$id/maps & canonical form

Each row in /proc/$PID/maps describes a region of contiguous virtual memory in a process or thread. Each row has the following fields:

address           perms offset  dev   inode   pathname
08048000-08056000 r-xp 00000000 03:0c 64593   /usr/sbin/gpm

• address - This is the starting and ending address of the region in the process's address space
• permissions - This describes how pages in the region can be accessed. There are four different permissions: read, write, execute, and shared. If read/write/execute are disabled, a '-' will appear instead of the 'r'/'w'/'x'. If a region is not shared, it is private, so a 'p' will appear instead of an 's'. If the process attempts to access memory in a way that is not permitted, a segmentation fault is generated. Permissions can be changed using the mprotect system call.
• offset - If the region was mapped from a file (using mmap), this is the offset in the file where the mapping begins. If the memory was not mapped from a file, it's just 0.
• device - If the region was mapped from a file, this is the major and minor device number (in hex) where the file lives.
• inode - If the region was mapped from a file, this is the file number.
• pathname - If the region was mapped from a file, this is the name of the file. This field is blank for anonymous mapped regions. There are also special regions with names like [heap], [stack], or [vdso]. [vdso] stands for virtual dynamic shared object. It's used by system calls to switch to kernel mode. Here's a good article about it.

You might notice a lot of anonymous regions. These are usually created by mmap but are not attached to any file. They are used for a lot of miscellaneous things like shared memory or buffers not allocated on the heap. For instance, I think the pthread library uses anonymous mapped regions as stacks for new threads.

Canonical Form

Process's virtual address space is divided into 2, higher half and lower half.

From 0000,0000,0000,0000 ~ 0000,7fff,ffff,ffff is used by user space and 

From FFFF,8000,0000,0000 ~ FFFF,FFFF,FFFF,FFF is used by kernel space.

So /proc/$PID/maps almost shows user space, kernel space is replaced by vsyscall

ffff,ffff,ff60,0000-ffff,ffff,ff60,1000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                  [vsyscall]

This mean only vsyscall interface is opened for user application.

References:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401359/understanding-linux-proc-id-maps

/proc/$id/numa_maps http://linux.die.net/man/5/numa_maps

Canonical form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64