On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 12:22:31PM +0000, Alex Hayward wrote: > On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Jim C. Nasby wrote: > > > On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 11:03:26PM +1200, Mark Kirkwood wrote: > > > > > > So its really all about accounting, in a sense - whether pages end up in > > > the 'Buf' or 'Inactive' queue, they are still cached! > > > > So what's the difference between Buf and Active then? Just that active > > means it's a code page, or that it's been directly mapped into a > > processes memory (perhaps via mmap)? > > I don't think that Buf and Active are mutually exclusive. Try adding up > Active, Inactive, Cache, Wired, Buf and Free - it'll come to more than > your physical memory. > > Active gives an amount of physical memory. Buf gives an amount of > kernel-space virtual memory which provide the kernel with a window on to > pages in the other categories. In fact, I don't think that 'Buf' really > belongs in the list as it doesn't represent a 'type' of page at all. Ahhh, I get it... a KVM (what's that stand for anyway?) is required any time the kernel wants to access a page that doesn't belong to it, right? And actually, I just checked 4 machines and adding all the queues plus buf together didn't add up to total memory except on one of them (there adding just the queues came close; 1507.6MB on a 1.5GB machine). -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
