On Linux, I've never found an ioctl() solution. For our applications, we coded a general utility routine based on reading files in /proc/pid. There are a number of these files which give differing results. Here's the one we settled on (the question was tagged C++, and we handled I/O using C++ constructs, but it should be easily adaptable to C i/o routines if you need to):
#include <unistd.h>
#include <ios>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// process_mem_usage(double &, double &) - takes two doubles by reference,
// attempts to read the system-dependent data for a process' virtual memory
// size and resident set size, and return the results in KB.
//
// On failure, returns 0.0, 0.0
void process_mem_usage(double& vm_usage, double& resident_set)
{
using std::ios_base;
using std::ifstream;
using std::string;
vm_usage = 0.0;
resident_set = 0.0;
// 'file' stat seems to give the most reliable results
//
ifstream stat_stream("/proc/self/stat",ios_base::in);
// dummy vars for leading entries in stat that we don't care about
//
string pid, comm, state, ppid, pgrp, session, tty_nr;
string tpgid, flags, minflt, cminflt, majflt, cmajflt;
string utime, stime, cutime, cstime, priority, nice;
string O, itrealvalue, starttime;
// the two fields we want
//
unsigned long vsize;
long rss;
stat_stream >> pid >> comm >> state >> ppid >> pgrp >> session >> tty_nr
>> tpgid >> flags >> minflt >> cminflt >> majflt >> cmajflt
>> utime >> stime >> cutime >> cstime >> priority >> nice
>> O >> itrealvalue >> starttime >> vsize >> rss; // don't care about the rest
stat_stream.close();
long page_size_kb = sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE) / 1024; // in case x86-64 is configured to use 2MB pages
vm_usage = vsize / 1024.0;
resident_set = rss * page_size_kb;
}
int main()
{
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
double vm, rss;
process_mem_usage(vm, rss);
cout << "VM: " << vm << "; RSS: " << rss << endl;
}