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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
