Thread: free memory
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Old 7th July 2010
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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No, you have 863MB free. Unassigned to any process.

You have 136MB assigned to processes.

Of those processes, some are active, some are not. The active processes are consuming 32MB of RAM.

863+136= 999MB. The rest of your 1GB, about 25MB, is consumed by reserved memory. Video RAM, as an example. I'm not sure if the kernel is included in the count of "active" memory or not, or if it falls into the unmentioned reserve. I honestly don't recall, exactly what is considered reserved, nor, if I had a system in your situation, with so much unassigned RAM, would I particularly care.

If you can read C, you can look through the source code, which, if I am not mistaken, will be in /usr/src/usr.bin/top if you have acquired the source. You can determine, from the code, which syscalls are used to obtain information, then dig through each syscall's man page and then the related kernel source code, for the definitive answers.
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