Free memory, include "cached"?

Gregoire Banderet gregoire.banderet at ge.com
Tue Oct 7 02:40:08 EST 2008


Hello,

I have to report the amount of FreeMem on my embedded system. The rootfs
is in RAM. I use /proc/meminfo.
I started by doing : freemem = MemFree + Buffers + Cached
But I realized (tell me if I'm wrong) that my rootfs filesystems is
counted in "Cached".
Part of the memory in "Cached" can be allocated, so I should add it as
Free Memory, but part of it is my rootfs (i.e. really used).
How should I compute freemem ?

Note that with linux 2.4 (initrd and not initramfs) I did use the ioctl 
BLKGETSIZE in order to subtract the amount of memory used by the rootfs. 
But now with initramfs it's dynamic.

Thanks,
Greg



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