2.6.5-rc3-mm4 tmpfs, free and free memory reporting

CaT
2004-04-25T13:03:54Z

I noticed that the OoM killer was being rather brutal to my tasks
even though free was reporting that I had 150meg of ram left. It wasn't
until much later that I realise that I have tmpfs being used as /tmp
and I checked that. Once I cleaned that up a big all was well. The
hassle was, the memory used by tmpfs was being reported as being used
by the cache. That may be so internally but shouldn't it be reported
as actually used ram as it cannot be dumped for processes like a normal
disk cache can and therefore cannot be considered to be 'free' ram.

--
Red herrings strewn hither and yon.