linux free 命令中的 buffer & free

Short answer:  Cached  is the size of the page cache.  Buffers  is the size of in-memory block I/O buffers.  Cached  matters;  Buffers  is largely irrelevant.

Long answer:  Cached  is the size of the Linux page cache, minus the memory in the swap cache, which is represented by  SwapCached  (thus the total page cache size is  Cached  +  SwapCached ). Linux performs a ll file I/O through the page cache. Writes are implemented as simply marking as dirty the corresponding pages in the page  c ache; the flusher threads then periodically write back to disk any dirty pages. Reads are implemented by returning the data from the page cache; if the data is not yet in the cache, it is first populated. On a modern Linux system,  Cached  can easily be several gigabytes. It will shrink only in response to memory pressure. The system will purge the page cache along with swapping data out to disk to make available more memory as needed.

Buffers  are in-memory block I/O buffers. They are relatively short-lived. Prior to Linux kernel version 2.4, Linux had separate page and buffer caches. Since 2.4, the page and buffer cache are unified and  Buffers  is raw disk blocks not represented in the page cache—i.e., not file data. The  Buffers  metric is thus of minimal importance. On most systems,  Buffers  is often only tens of megabytes.