Question

As a programming exercise, I am writing a mark-and-sweep garbage collector in C. I wish to scan the data segment (globals, etc.) for pointers to allocated memory, but I don’t know how to get the range of the addresses of this segment. How could I do this?

Answer 1

The bounds for text (program code) and data for linux (and other unixes):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

/* these are in no header file, and on some
systems they have a _ prepended 
These symbols have to be typed to keep the compiler happy
Also check out brk() and sbrk() for information
about heap */

extern char  etext, edata, end; 

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    printf("First address beyond:\n");
    printf("    program text segment(etext)      %10p\n", &etext);
    printf("    initialized data segment(edata)  %10p\n", &edata);
    printf("    uninitialized data segment (end) %10p\n", &end);

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Where those symbols come from: Where are the symbols etext ,edata and end defined?