proc_buddyinfo(5) — Linux manual page
proc_buddyinfo(5) File Formats Manual proc_buddyinfo(5)
NAME
/proc/buddyinfo - memory fragmentation
DESCRIPTION
/proc/buddyinfo
This file contains information which is used for
diagnosing memory fragmentation issues. Each line starts
with the identification of the node and the name of the
zone which together identify a memory region. This is
then followed by the count of available chunks of a
certain order in which these zones are split. The size in
bytes of a certain order is given by the formula:
(2^order) * PAGE_SIZE
The binary buddy allocator algorithm inside the kernel
will split one chunk into two chunks of a smaller order
(thus with half the size) or combine two contiguous chunks
into one larger chunk of a higher order (thus with double
the size) to satisfy allocation requests and to counter
memory fragmentation. The order matches the column
number, when starting to count at zero.
For example on an x86-64 system:
Node 0, zone DMA 1 1 1 0 2 1 1 0 1 1 3
Node 0, zone DMA32 65 47 4 81 52 28 13 10 5 1 404
Node 0, zone Normal 216 55 189 101 84 38 37 27 5 3 587
In this example, there is one node containing three zones
and there are 11 different chunk sizes. If the page size
is 4 kilobytes, then the first zone called DMA (on x86 the
first 16 megabyte of memory) has 1 chunk of 4 kilobytes
(order 0) available and has 3 chunks of 4 megabytes (order
10) available.
If the memory is heavily fragmented, the counters for
higher order chunks will be zero and allocation of large
contiguous areas will fail.
Further information about the zones can be found in
/proc/zoneinfo.
SEE ALSO
proc(5)
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