brk¶

Intro¶

brk - manipulates the calling process's data segment.

Description¶

The brk() system call changes the location of the program break, which defines the end of the process's data segment (i.e., the program break is the first location after the end of the uninitialized data segment). Increasing the program break has the effect of allocating memory to the process; decreasing the break deallocates memory.

The functionality of the brk() system call is provided by libc, which implements brk() by calling the sbrk() system call.

Arguments¶

addr:void*[K] - pointer to the requested address at which the program break would be set.

Available Tags¶

K - Originated from kernel-space.

Hooks¶

sbrk¶

Type¶

Kprobe+Uprobe

Purpose¶

To hook this function to track when the program break is changed.

Example Use Case¶

brk() is used by programs to manage their own memory usage. This is particularly useful when dealing with dynamic memory allocation.

Issues¶

There is no guarantee that brk() will successfully allocate memory. Additionally, it can lead to memory fragmentation if memory is requested in large chunks rather than smaller ones.

malloc - for allocating memory in chunks larger than the page size.

This document was automatically generated by OpenAI and needs review. It might not be accurate and might contain errors. The authors of Tracee recommend that the user reads the "events.go" source file to understand the events and their arguments better.