anonymous mapping?

[pahtiv]

i am reading paper about grsecurity and pax, but i dont understand what "anonymous mapping" is?

can anybody explain it to me?

thank you,
pah

[PaX Team]

i am reading paper about grsecurity and pax, but i dont understand what "anonymous mapping" is?

take a look at /proc/self/maps and you will see that certain lines (mappings) do not have a file associated with them, they're the anonymous ones. they're used when there is no real file backing up that mapping (i.e., their initial content is implicitly initialized to 0), such as the stack or the heap.