From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail138.messagelabs.com (mail138.messagelabs.com [216.82.249.35]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 86D2C5F0001 for ; Mon, 6 Apr 2009 17:54:50 -0400 (EDT) Received: from d03relay02.boulder.ibm.com (d03relay02.boulder.ibm.com [9.17.195.227]) by e39.co.us.ibm.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id n36LqWfT019588 for ; Mon, 6 Apr 2009 15:52:32 -0600 Received: from d03av01.boulder.ibm.com (d03av01.boulder.ibm.com [9.17.195.167]) by d03relay02.boulder.ibm.com (8.13.8/8.13.8/NCO v9.2) with ESMTP id n36LtcxN180390 for ; Mon, 6 Apr 2009 15:55:38 -0600 Received: from d03av01.boulder.ibm.com (loopback [127.0.0.1]) by d03av01.boulder.ibm.com (8.12.11.20060308/8.13.3) with ESMTP id n36Ltc9m010268 for ; Mon, 6 Apr 2009 15:55:38 -0600 Subject: procps and new kernel fields From: Dave Hansen Content-Type: text/plain Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:55:36 -0700 Message-Id: <1239054936.8846.130.camel@nimitz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: bart.vanassche@gmail.com Cc: linux-mm , procps-feedback@lists.sf.net, acahalan@cs.uml.edu List-ID: There was a very brief conversation about this a year ago or so. We've got a ton of newfangled output in /proc/meminfo, but procps ignores most of it. There's also a bunch of types of memory that don't get shown by the various procps commands these days. http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=120496901605830&w=2 Novell has integrated that patch into procps which has the side-effect that now reclaimable slab and unstable NFS pages are included in the 'cached' output of vmstat and free. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=405246 The most worrisome side-effect of this change to me is that we can no longer run vmstat or free on two machines and compare their output. At the same time, we have machines that have dozens of GB of slab objects that are mostly reclaimable. Yet, 'free' and 'vmstat' basically ignore slab. Surely we need to find some way to report on those, especially since we can now break out {un,}reclaimable slab. We also have "new" memory use like unstable NFS pages. How should we account for those? I'd love to see an --extended output from things like vmstat. It could include wider output since fitting in 80 columns just isn't that important any more, and my 256GB machine's output really screws up the column alignment. We could also add some information which is in addition to what we already provide in order to account for things like slab more precisely. -- Dave -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org