How to find how much memory consumed by Linux Kernel in my system

[KRUPASINDHU PRADHAN]

Hi,
I have a simple question.

Linux Node1 2.6.10-telco-1.46-mckinley-smp #1 SMP Fri May 30 18:29:43 UTC 2008 ia64 GNU/Linux


1. How to determine what is the total amount of kernel memory consumed in my IA64 LINUX System ?

2. How to determine per process level how much kernel memory is consumed(or it does make sense as kernel works for all process , and there would be mutual memory used for all process from kernel)

Thanks
Krupa

[_madman_]

The basic idea to find out your kernel memory usage is that the kernel itself is not a user space program so its memory usage is not generally reported. So if you subtract your "Total Available (physical) Memory" from your actual system memory, you have your answer.

One possible solution is:

cat /proc/meminfo

(if you have the proc filesystem enabled in your kernel)
Note the top value of "MemTotal" , mine is 319,584 KB

Then get your actual physical memory for your system from your BIOS. Mine is 320 MB (320 * 1024 = 327,680 KB)

Therefore my kernel is using about 8,096 KB of RAM (7.9 MB)

--

As for the second question. Yes, the kernel works for all processes. However, buffers and cache sizes do change, as well as loaded modules (unless you use a monolithic kernel like me). As far as I know, all of these are reported in user space memory (kind of, anyway). They are the processes in brackets if you execute:

ps aux