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Re: Memory usage: buffer and cache



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Eric Gaumer <gaumerel@ecs.fullerton.edu> writes:

> On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 00:37, Paul Johnson wrote:
>> OK, this is probably the most obvious question ever, but I just can't
>> find it in Google or Wikipedia.
>> 
>> Just what the heck is the difference between buffer and cache in terms
>> of memory usage?  What is each catagory used for?
>
> Kernel buffer cache stores the most recently accessed blocks from a
> block device.

OK, no real surprise there, that's more or less what I thought was
going on there.

> Kernel cache stores cached kernel data structures. So say you create a
> process, a new task_struct may be created. When that process is
> destroyed, the kernel will cache that data structure so that it doesn't
> have to keep allocating and destroying common data structures. This is
> the purpose of the slab layer.

Ah, there we go.  That makes sense.  So it's kind of like a buffer for
system calls?

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