linux内存管理实验,linux 内存管理 命令

Overview of memory

management

Traditional Unix tools like 'top' often report a surprisingly small

amount of free memory after a system has been running for a while.

For instance, after about 3 hours of uptime, the machine I'm

writing this on reports under 60 MB of free memory, even though I

have 512 MB of RAM on the system. Where does it all go?

The biggest place it's being used is in the disk cache, which is

currently over 290 MB. This is reported by top as "cached". Cached

memory is essentially free, in that it can be replaced quickly if a

running (or newly starting) program needs the memory.

The reason Linux uses so much memory for disk cache is because the

RAM is wasted if it isn't used. Keeping the cache means that if

something needs the same data again, there's a good chance it will

still be in the cache in memory. Fetching the information from

there is around 1,000 times quicker than getting it from the hard

disk. If it's not found in the cache, the hard disk needs to be

read anyway, but in that case nothing has been lost in time.

To see a better estimation of how much memory is really free for

applications to use, run the command free -m:

Code: free

-m

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 503 451 52 0 14 293

-/+ buffers/cache: 143 360

Swap: 1027 0 1027

The -/+

buffers/cache line shows how much memory

is used and free from the perspective of the applications.

Generally speaking, if little swap is being used, memory usage

isn't impacting performance at all.

Notice that I have 512 MB of memory in my machine, but only 52 is

listed as available by free. This is mainly because the kernel

can't be swapped out, so the memory it occupies could never be

freed. There may also be regions of memory reserved for/by the

hardware for other purposes as well, depending on the system

architecture. However, 360M are free for application

consumption.

Virtual Memory Area

Virtual

memory allows non-contiguous memory to be

addressed as if it is contiguous. Each process has a memory map

made up of (at least):

Program's executable code (called text)

Areas for data, that could be initialized (assigned value at the

beginning of execution), uninitialized data (BSS), and the program

stack.

One area for each active memory mapping

Let's see how we can see the memory area of a process. We first

have to identify the process we want to look at. We can

use ps

-A for that:

# ps -A

PID TTY TIME CMD

1 ? 00:00:00 init

2 ? 00:00:00 ksoftirqd/0

We are going to look at init that has

the pid 1. Looking at at

/proc//maps we can see

the memory area of a process. In this case:

# cat /proc/1/maps

08048000-08050000 r-xp 00000000 16:46 493923 /sbin/init (executable code)

08050000-08051000 rw-p 00007000 16:46 493923 /sbin/init (data)

08051000-08072000 rw-p 08051000 00:00 0 [heap]

b7e2b000-b7e2c000 rw-p b7e2b000 00:00 0

b7e2c000-b7f4c000 r-xp 00000000 16:46 3770390 /lib/libc-2.5.so

b7f4c000-b7f4d000 r--p 00120000 16:46 3770390 /lib/libc-2.5.so

b7f4d000-b7f4f000 rw-p 00121000 16:46 3770390 /lib/libc-2.5.so

b7f4f000-b7f53000 rw-p b7f4f000 00:00 0

b7f6f000-b7f70000 r-xp b7f6f000 00:00 0 [vdso]

b7f70000-b7f8a000 r-xp 00000000 16:46 3770498 /lib/ld-2.5.so

b7f8a000-b7f8b000 r--p 00019000 16:46 3770498 /lib/ld-2.5.so

b7f8b000-b7f8c000 rw-p 0001a000 16:46 3770498 /lib/ld-2.5.so

bf8fc000-bf911000 rw-p bf8fc000 00:00 0 [stack]

The columns correspond to:

start-end perm offset major:minor inode image

Meaning:

Start and end of virtual address.

Permissions (read, write, execute, private/shared).

Offset

Major and minor numbers holding the mapped file.

Inode number

Name of the mapped file.

We can look at the different memory regions by looking at

/proc/iomem. In my AMD XP:

File: # cat

/proc/iomem

00000000-0009fbff : System RAM

0009fc00-0009ffff : reserved

000a0000-000bffff : Video RAM area

000c0000-000ccfff : Video ROM

000f0000-000fffff : System ROM

00100000-5ffeffff : System RAM

00100000-00405770 : Kernel code

00405771-0054148b : Kernel data

5fff0000-5fff7fff : ACPI Tables

5fff8000-5fffffff : ACPI Non-volatile Storage

70000000-7001ffff : 0000:00:04.0

afa00000-cfbfffff : PCI Bus #01

b8000000-bfffffff : 0000:01:00.1

c0000000-c7ffffff : 0000:01:00.0

cfd00000-cfefffff : PCI Bus #01

cfec0000-cfedffff : 0000:01:00.0

cfee0000-cfeeffff : 0000:01:00.1

cfef0000-cfefffff : 0000:01:00.0

cfffb800-cfffbfff : 0000:00:0c.0

cfffb800-cfffbfff : ohci1394

cfffc000-cfffcfff : 0000:00:04.0

cfffc000-cfffcfff : sis900

cfffd000-cfffdfff : 0000:00:03.0

cfffd000-cfffdfff : ohci_hcd

cfffe000-cfffefff : 0000:00:03.1

cfffe000-cfffefff : ohci_hcd

cffff000-cfffffff : 0000:00:03.2

cffff000-cfffffff : ehci_hcd

d0000000-d3ffffff : 0000:00:00.0

fec00000-fec00fff : reserved

fee00000-fee00fff : reserved

ffee0000-ffefffff : reserved

fffc0000-ffffffff : reserved

We can look at how different devices are mapped into the memory. If

we have a look at my video card:

# lspci -vvv

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA])

Region 0: Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]

Region 1: I/O ports at a800 [size=256]

Region 2: Memory at cfef0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]

We can see that /proc/iomem shows the card memory allocation.

The mysterious 880 MB limit on

x86

By default, the Linux kernel runs in and manages only low memory.

This makes managing the page tables slightly easier, which in turn

makes memory accesses slightly faster. The downside is that it

can't use all of the memory once the amount of total RAM reaches

the neighborhood of 880 MB. This has historically not been a

problem, especially for desktop machines.

To be able to use all the RAM on a 1GB machine or better, the

kernel needs to be recompiled. Go into 'make menuconfig' (or

whichever config is preferred) and set the following option:

Linux Kernel Configuration: Large amounts of

memory

Processor Type and Features ---->

High Memory Support ---->

(*) 4GB

This applies both to 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Turning on high memory

support theoretically slows down accesses slightly, but according

to Joseph_sys and log, there is no practical difference.

Also, the ck-sources kernel

has a patch for 1gb high memory support.

The difference among VIRT, RES, and SHR

in top output

VIRT stands for the virtual size of a process, which is the sum of

memory it is actually using, memory it has mapped into itself (for

instance the video card's RAM for the X server), files on disk that

have been mapped into it (most notably shared libraries), and

memory shared with other processes. VIRT represents how much memory

the program is able to access at the present moment.

RES stands for the resident size, which is an accurate

representation of how much actual physical memory a process is

consuming. (This also corresponds directly to the %MEM column.)

This will virtually always be less than the VIRT size, since most

programs depend on the C library.

SHR indicates how much of the VIRT size is actually sharable

(memory or libraries). In the case of libraries, it does not

necessarily mean that the entire library is resident. For example,

if a program only uses a few functions in a library, the whole

library is mapped and will be counted in VIRT and SHR, but only the

parts of the library file containing the functions being used will

actually be loaded in and be counted under RES.

The difference between buffers and

cache

Buffers are allocated by various processes to use as input queues,

etc. Most of the time, buffers are some processes' output, and they

are file buffers. A simplistic explanation of buffers is that they

allow processes to temporarily store input in memory until the

process can deal with it.

Cache is typically frequently requested disk I/O. If multiple

processes are accessing the same files, much of those files will be

cached to improve performance (RAM being so much faster than hard

drives), it's disk cache.

Swappiness (2.6 kernels)

Since 2.6, there has been a way to tune how much Linux favors

swapping out to disk compared to shrinking the caches when memory

gets full.

When an application needs memory and all the RAM is fully occupied,

the kernel has two ways to free some memory at its disposal: it can

either reduce the disk cache in the RAM by eliminating the oldest

data or it may swap some less used memory (anonymous pages) of

processess out to the swap partition on disk. It is not easy to

predict which method would be more efficient. The kernel makes a

choice by roughly guessing the effectiveness of the two methods at

a given instant, based on the recent history of activity.

Before the 2.6 kernels, the user had no possible means to influence

the calculations and there could happen situations where the kernel

often made the wrong choice, leading to thrashing and slow

performance. The addition of swappiness in 2.6 changes this.

Thanks, ghoti!

Swappiness takes a value between 0 and 100 to change the balance

between swapping processess anonymous pages and freeing cache. At

100, the kernel will always prefer to find inactive pages and swap

them out; in other cases, whether a swapout occurs depends on how

much application memory is in use and how poorly the cache is doing

at finding and releasing inactive items.

The default swappiness is 60. A value of 0 gives something close to

the old behavior where applications that wanted memory could shrink

the cache to a tiny fraction of RAM. For laptops which would prefer

to let their disk spin down, a value of 20 or less is

recommended.

As a sysctl, the swappiness can be set at runtime with either of

the following commands:

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=30

echo 30 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The default when Gentoo boots can also be set

in /etc/sysctl.conf:

File: /etc/sysctl.conf

# Control how much the kernel should favor swapping out applications (0-100)

vm.swappiness = 30

Some patchsets (e.g. Con Kolivas' ck-sources patchset) allow the

kernel to auto-tune the swappiness level as it sees fit; they may

not keep a user-set value.

Autoregulation

gentoo-sources (and

probably other gentoo 2.6 kernels) prior to 2.6.7-gentoo contains

the Con Kolivas autoregulated swappiness patch. This means that the

kernel automatically adjusts the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness value as

needed during runtime, so any changes you make will be clobbered

next time it updates. A good explanation of this patch and how it

works is on

I repeat: With gentoo-sources (prior to

2.6.7-gentoo) it is neither necessary nor possible to permanently

adjust the swappiness value. It's taken

care of automatically, no need to worry.

gentoo-sources no longer contains this patch as of 2.6.7-gentoo.

The maintainer of gentoo-sources, Greg, pulled the autoregulation

patch from the ebuild.

Credits

Original Forum

Post by sapphirecat

Original Forum

Post about

autoregulation by bk0

Linux Device

Drivers by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini,

and Greg Kroah-Hartman. Published by O’Reilly Media.