TIL: Accessing memory in another process under Linux

Today it was hit home for me that I am now a "Windows guy", because I couldn't remember the name for the select or epoll syscalls, only muttering "WaitForMultipleObjects?" and scratching my head. This was hit further home because I couldn't think of anything other than ptrace for accessing another process's data. Granted, my friend says I've always been a Windows guy and I should get over it. But I really only started learning about how computers work when I began working with Linux, so this bothered me. Hence, I took a little walk down syscalls.h in 3.7.1 to see what would jog my memory or what new things I would find. Indeed, I did find something interesting and relevant.

include/linux/syscalls.h:

856 asmlinkage long sys_process_vm_readv(pid_t pid,
857                      const struct iovec __user *lvec,
858                      unsigned long liovcnt,
859                      const struct iovec __user *rvec,
860                      unsigned long riovcnt,
861                      unsigned long flags);
862 asmlinkage long sys_process_vm_writev(pid_t pid,
863                       const struct iovec __user *lvec,
864                       unsigned long liovcnt,
865                       const struct iovec __user *rvec,
866                       unsigned long riovcnt,
867                       unsigned long flags);

And here is a bookmark to the relevant file in LXR.

It's been a long time since I hacked on Linux, but I wonder what other interesting things have been added since I went over to the dark side (or came back to it, depending upon how you look at it).