mprotect(2)

mprotect2

Control the protection of pages

Usage

#include <sys/mman.h>

int

mprotect(void *addr, size_t len, int prot);

Overview

The mprotect() system call changes the specified pages to have protection prot. Not all implementations will guarantee protection on a page basis but Mac OS X's current implementation does.

When a program violates the protections of a page, it gets a SIGBUS or SIGSEGV signal.

Currently prot can be one or more of the following:

PROT_NONE

No permissions at all.

PROT_READ

The pages can be read.

PROT_WRITE

The pages can be written.

PROT_EXEC

The pages can be executed.

Return values

Upon successful completion, a value of 0 is returned. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

Errors

mprotect() will fail if:

[EACCES]

The requested protection conflicts with the access permissions of the process on the specified address range.

[EINVAL]

addr is not a multiple of the page size (i.e. addr is not page-aligned).

[ENOMEM]

The specified address range is outside of the address range of the process or includes an unmapped page.

[ENOTSUP]

The combination of accesses requested in prot is not supported.

Legacy synopsis

#include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/mman.h>

The include file ⟨sys/types.h⟩ is necessary.

int
mprotect(caddr_t addr, size_t len, int prot);

The type of addr has changed.

Releases

155 releases since Mac OS X 10.0; the text changed 3 times.

  1. 10.0–10.4.11
  2. 10.5–10.5.8
  3. 10.6–11.5
  4. 12.0.1–26.5

History

The mprotect() function first appeared in 4.4BSD.

From xnu 12377.121.6 in macOS 26.5. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.