On Tue, 27 Sep 2011, Christoph Lameter wrote: > Viewing free memory is usually necessary to check on reclaim activities > (things otherwise operating normally). "free" memory (in the sense of the > memory that an application can still allocate) is not really displayed by > free. Wish we had a new free that avoids all the misinterpretations. > > Meminfo is also requires by vmstat. > Even with the patch, you could still get all this information by summing up the per-node meminfo in /sys/devices/system/node/nodeX/meminfo. Non-root users certainly need to be able to use things like numactl and be able to specify their own mempolicies for NUMA machines, so limiting basic memory state information isn't going to work. I'd much rather just convert everything to use MB rather than KB so you can't determine things at a page level. I think that gets us much closer to what the patch is intending to restrict. But I also expect some breakage from things that just expect meminfo to be in KB units without parsing what the kernel is exporting. > If we want to go down this route then we need some sort of diagnostic > group that a user must be part of in order to allow viewing of basic > memory statistics. > It'll turn into another one of our infinite number of capabilities. Does anything actually care about statistics at KB granularity these days? -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>