Re: PPtop 0.1.1
On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 05:00:43AM -0700, James Morrison wrote:
> Since I can't seem to find a way to get vmstat to show the total amount of
> memory on other systems I don't see any ideas to follow. The documentation
> (--help) says 'usable physical memory', so I guess the 'size' fields does what
> it should. However, to make this clear should the size field be in vmstat be
> renamed, externally, to 'usable size'?
Why are you so hooked up on the idea that the size field in vmstat has
anything to do with the total of physical memory in the system?
For example, I have 1GB in one of my machines, and pass the uppermem option
to limit this to 768 MB for GNU Mach. vmstat shows 754M for "size", which
looks reasonable.
Compare this with a partition that is bigger then the filesystem it
contains. vmstat would be comparable to getting information about the
filesystem.
It is entirely thinkable to have several virtual memory managers running,
each having available a part of the total physical memory.
Again, vmstat shows "system virtual memory statistics". The virtual memory
receives a part of the physical memory for operation. It does only know
about the part it gets.
Now, to come back to your suggestion renaming it to "usable size". If you
say usable size, you immediately raise the question of what is the unusable
size. But that is not a distinction that matters for the VM. The VM sees
the 754M (in my example), and all of those 754MB are fully usable.
Now, I might not be telling the truth. The one thing I don't know is if
this size contains the memory used by the VM itself. It would be
interesting to find this out. But that has nothing to do with the kernel
RAM.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
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