Re: make -j in Debian packages

[Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>]

On Fri, Jun 30, 2006 at 12:12:10PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> Oh, so you mean checking the _free_ RAM instead of the _physical_ RAM?
> This would be reasonable -- I didn't use this in the debian/rules
> snippet I proposed as the physical memory is a trivially discernable
> number while free RAM can be sometimes hard to tell, especially on Xen:
[...]
> Of course, when I say that something is tricky, it doesn't mean that
> someone with more clue than me can't do it.
[...]

Just grep it out of /proc/meminfo? Something like this ugly bit of
bourne shell:

   echo $(
      grep ^MemTotal: /proc/meminfo | awk '{ print $2 }'
   ) - $(
      grep ^MemFree: /proc/meminfo | awk '{ print $2 }'
   ) - $(
      grep ^Buffers: /proc/meminfo | awk '{ print $2 }'
   ) - $(
      grep ^Cached: /proc/meminfo | awk '{ print $2 }'
   ) | bc

Which would give you a count of the total kb minus what's free and
in use for buffers/cache, similar to what free(1) spits out, but
probably not identical. That might not be an option on older kernels
(I seem to remember dealing with some /proc/meminfo change a while
back that broke check_swap in nagios-plugins), or at least might
differ at particular points in the kernel's release history.
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