No free memory on Linux 2.6?
On the maemo developers list, there was recently a thread about running Asterisk on the device. It is working, however the program gets sometimes killed by the kernel, it turned out to be a memory issue.
total used free
Mem: 61828 60068 1760
Swap: 0 0 0
Total: 61828 60068 1760
-break->
So there’s less than 2 MB of memory available?? The device is advertised as having 64MB of RAM, but how can I increase the amount that’s actually available to applications?
Following this came Greg KHs answer:
You can’t think of “free” as the only amount of free memory in the
system. The 2.6 kernel will try to suck up all available memory if it
possibly can for it’s internal caches. If memory is needed by other
things (like programs) it is easily given back.About all free is good for these days is to see that you have a swap
device (or not) working, and if you have a kernel memory leak.
Good to know that free is useless on recent kernels.
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