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Re: PPtop 0.1.1



--- Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
> 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'?
> 
> 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.

 I want to distinguish between the memory the user expects the machine to have
and the memory the machine can use.  So, if you boot with an option to
grub to limit your memory, then we can just assume that value passed through
grub is the actual physical memory.  So, back to 'usable size'.  I mentioned
that the documentation, --help, says
       --size                 Usable physical memory

 If this were changed to
       --usable-size                 Usable physical memory

people may immediatly that usable size is only the amount of memory that can 
be used, not the memory they think they have.  Does this make sense?
 
> Thanks,
> Marcus
> 


=====
James Morrison
   University of Waterloo
   Computer Science - Digital Hardware
   2A co-op
http://hurd.dyndns.org

Anyone referring to this as 'Open Source' shall be eaten by a GNU

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