http://lwn.net/Articles/7868/
The following patch originally by Martin Bligh exports some information about the buddy allocator. Each column of numbers represents the number of pages of that order which are available. In this case, there are 5 chunks of 2^2*PAGE_SIZE available in ZONE_DMA, and 101 chunks of 2^4*PAGE_SIZE availble in ZONE_NORMAL, etc... This information can give you a good idea about how fragmented memory is and give you a clue as to how big of an area you can safely allocate. Node 0, zone DMA 0 4 5 4 4 3 ... Node 0, zone Normal 1 0 0 1 101 8 ... Node 0, zone HighMem 2 0 0 1 1 0 ... -- Dave Hansen haveblue@us.ibm.com