Shared libraries are mapped into each process address space with mmap(). They
are never explicitly loaded or unloaded. When a page is first used, the kernel
faults it in from the file. If a page has been unused for some time (even if
its still mapped), it may be dropped from memory. If a file has no mappings,
it will still exist cached in memory until it gets evicted by the normal
process (which may not ever happen if its frequently used).
/proc/<pid>/maps will show you all the shared libraries used by a process,
including the virtual size. Its very hard to tell how much physical memory
each mapping is using however.
Normal executables work a lot like shared libraries, except the mmap() is done
implicitly by execve().
J
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