/proc/meminfo values

/proc/meminfo values

[Andreas Unterkircher]

hello.

one question, didn't find any other information souce.

in kernel 2.4 /proc/meminfo writes back exactly mem info values
in the first 2 lines like:

cat /proc/meminfo
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  244191232 238395392  5795840        0  2732032 138403840
Swap: 509923328 147443712 362479616


but with 2.6 it looks like they have been removed. where can i get the
exactly free memory (+ swap) from the kernel so i havn't to use the
kb-values which i get back from /proc/meminfo?

i try to check the source good from "free" (with the -b option it
returns the bytes-value) which seems to simple multiply *1024 to
the kb values.


thanks for any info!

greetings, andi

Re: /proc/meminfo values

[Rik van Riel]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Andreas Unterkircher wrote:

> but with 2.6 it looks like they have been removed. where can i get the
> exactly free memory (+ swap) from the kernel so i havn't to use the
> kb-values which i get back from /proc/meminfo?

The values are in page granularity.  On x86 you're not going
to get them at any finer granularity than 4kB increments,
because that is the page size.

The kB values are still smaller than the allocation granularity,
so no accuracy is lost.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Re: /proc/meminfo values

[Rob Love]

On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 09:50, Andreas Unterkircher wrote:

> cat /proc/meminfo
>         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> Mem:  244191232 238395392  5795840        0  2732032 138403840
> Swap: 509923328 147443712 362479616

This view is gone.  Use something like free(1) or a custom script to
recreate it.

> but with 2.6 it looks like they have been removed. where can i get the
> exactly free memory (+ swap) from the kernel so i havn't to use the
> kb-values which i get back from /proc/meminfo?
> 
> i try to check the source good from "free" (with the -b option it
> returns the bytes-value) which seems to simple multiply *1024 to
> the kb values.

But everything is page granularity already, which is 4KB on x86.  Going
to bytes would not gain you anything.

	Rob Love

Re: /proc/meminfo values

[Andreas Unterkircher]

Am Mon, den 22.12.2003 schrieb Rob Love um 16:31:
> On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 09:50, Andreas Unterkircher wrote:
> 
> > cat /proc/meminfo
> >         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> > Mem:  244191232 238395392  5795840        0  2732032 138403840
> > Swap: 509923328 147443712 362479616
> 
> This view is gone.  Use something like free(1) or a custom script to
> recreate it.
> 
> > but with 2.6 it looks like they have been removed. where can i get the
> > exactly free memory (+ swap) from the kernel so i havn't to use the
> > kb-values which i get back from /proc/meminfo?
> > 
> > i try to check the source good from "free" (with the -b option it
> > returns the bytes-value) which seems to simple multiply *1024 to
> > the kb values.
> 
> But everything is page granularity already, which is 4KB on x86.  Going
> to bytes would not gain you anything.

Ok, i'm unterstand :) I will simple multiply the proc values with 1024
when i want to use them with the cricket-snmp-collector. this seems to
be exactly enough - i only want to know - thanks rob and rik for the
info!

greetings, andi

> 
> 	Rob Love
> 
> 

Re: /proc/meminfo values

[Mike Fedyk]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2003 at 04:34:38PM +0100, Andreas Unterkircher wrote:
> Ok, i'm unterstand :) I will simple multiply the proc values with 1024
> when i want to use them with the cricket-snmp-collector. this seems to
> be exactly enough - i only want to know - thanks rob and rik for the
> info!

You might want to check out the perl script I updated recently in the lrrd
project.  It tries to extract as much information from each kernel version
as possible that is presented in /proc/meminfo (and slabinfo for 2.4).

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/lrrd/lrrd/client/lrrd.d.linux/memory.in?sortby=date

Mike