Re: output of `free`

bofh@snoopy.virtual.net.au
Wed, 26 Mar 97 15:41:11 +1000

>> Here's the output of running `free` on one of my systems (2.1.29).
> Is it right to have more shared memory than physical RAM? A quick
> inspection of the kernel source indicates that the code goes through a
>map
> of physical RAM and counts pages, therefore shared should be less than
> total RAM (the machine has 32megs). Is something wrong or am I
> misunderstanding this?
>>
>> total used free shared buffers cached
>> Mem: 30760 30360 400 54084 188 2544
>> -/+ buffers: 27628 3132
>> Swap: 127004 7248 119756

>My limited, non-expert understanding of this is that every process gets
>its shared memory region counted. This implies that shared memory can be
> larger than actual memory. ie, given the following:

>process shared region and size

>1 A (300K)
>2 A
>3 A
>4 B (500K)
>5 B

>The total shared memory shown in free is 3*A + 2*B = 1900K.

Thanks for the information.

Now does anyone know where I can find documentation on what all the files in /proc do? If there is none then I'm prepared to start writing it...

Russell Coker