library: properly handle memory used by tmpfs

tmpfs has become much more widely used since distributions use it for
/tmp (Fedora 18+). In /proc/meminfo, memory used by tmpfs is accounted
into "Cached" (aka "NR_FILE_PAGES",
 http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/mm/shmem.c#L301 ).

The tools just pass it on, so what top, free and vmstat report as
"cached" is the sum of page cache and tmpfs.

free has the extremely useful "-/+ buffers/cache" output. However, now
that tmpfs is accounted into "cached", those numbers are way off once
you have big files in /tmp.

Fortunately, kernel 2.6.32 introduces "Shmem", which makes tmpfs memory
usage accessible from userspace (
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4b02108ac1b3354a22b0d83c684797692efdc395 ).

This patch substracts Shmem from Cached to get the actual page cache
memory. This makes both issues mentioned above disappear. For older
kernels, Shmem is not available (hence zero) and this patch is no-op.

Additionally:
* Update the man pages of free and vmstat to explain what is happening
* Finally drop "MemShared" from the /proc/meminfo parser, it has been
  dead for 10+ years and is only causing confusion ( removed in kernel
  2.5.54, see
  https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git/commit/?id=fe04e9451e5a159247cf9f03c615a4273ac0c571 )
This commit is contained in:
Jakob Unterwurzacher
2014-02-18 22:12:21 +01:00
committed by Jaromir Capik
parent 24f1fbd9d0
commit 3569c0351f
4 changed files with 31 additions and 12 deletions

View File

@ -102,7 +102,8 @@ b: The number of processes in uninterruptible sleep.
swpd: the amount of virtual memory used.
free: the amount of idle memory.
buff: the amount of memory used as buffers.
cache: the amount of memory used as cache.
cache: the amount of memory used as cache (excluding tmpfs memory for
kernels 2.6.32+)
inact: the amount of inactive memory. (\-a option)
active: the amount of active memory. (\-a option)
.fi