>>> On 5/17/2013 at 08:15 AM, Rob van der Heij <rvdh...@gmail.com> wrote: > That explains why it's not in RHEL since it is not part of the upstream > procps sources. The changelog entry has an innocent description like below. > > * Thu Nov 17 2011 wer...@suse.de > - Change order of parsing /proc/meminfo to make sure that > "Slab" and "SwapCached" fields are found (bnc#696351) > > I don't think this is a wise change, and I'm surprised a distributor would > do things like that. I can see that you might want to add swap cache if you > need to have a single number, but there's more value in having this > consistent in the distributions.
The actual change came much earlier: Thu Jul 10 18:24:14 CEST 2008 - wer...@suse.de - Annoying change in /proc/meminfo makes info about free memory useless ... thanks Bart Van Assche for spotting (bnc#405246) Looking at the bug report, there was quite a bit of discussion about the change, and how older versions (or other distribution's versions) would report different values. In the end, it boiled down to the upstream maintainer not doing much actual maintaining, and the old behavior being considered by everyone to be wrong. Some people weren't happy about the change in behavior, but the SUSE developer at the time decided he'd rather have correct information that was inconsistent with older versions, than incorrect information that was consistent with older versions. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
