Re: [bitfolk] Small amounts of RAM missing - any ideas?

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 10:33:32AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote: What does the kernel say? Because AFAIK it is normal for free to report less, since it does not take into account memory reserved (not cached) by the kernel. For example, in my VPS I see: $ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 463 446 16 0 82 185 $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 474404 396212 78192 0 85408 217324 However, you can also look at: # This only works in 32 bits AFAIK $ grep LOWMEM /var/log/dmesg [ 0.000000] 480MB LOWMEM available. # This should work in both 32 and 64 bits x86 $ grep Memory /var/log/dmesg [ 0.000000] Memory: 464964k/491520k available (5110k kernel code, 26112k reserved, 2437k data, 708k init, 0k highmem) 491520 / 1024 = 480. Now, the amount reported by free is taken from: $ grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 474404 kB which is slightly more than the available part mentioned by the kernel above. That is because after making the initial reservations, the kernel frees some of that: $ grep freed /var/log/dmesg [ 0.064167] Freeing SMP alternatives: 24k freed [ 0.212555] Freeing initrd memory: 8708k freed [ 0.468328] Freeing unused kernel memory: 708k freed And if we add what it freed to what the kernel reported initially as available: 464964 + 24 + 8708 + 708 = 474404 we get to the number used by free. I actually find it strange that it showed you the full amount of RAM. If you don't mind me asking, in those cases, what do the numbers above show? Thanks, Alberto