From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050928 Firefox/1.0.7 Description of problem: Size of /proc/kcore does not match installed RAM. # ls -l /proc/kcore -r-------- 1 root root 939528192 Oct 6 12:54 /proc/kcore # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2055312 2037452 17860 0 9168 1377076 -/+ buffers/cache: 651208 1404104 Swap: 755044 0 755044 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-smp-2.4.21-37.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. compare memory size as reported by free and the size of /proc/kcore 2. 3. Actual Results: Amount of physical memory reported differs. Expected Results: Amount of physical memory reported should be the same. Additional info: The machine is a Dell Poweredge 2600 w/2 Xeon CPUs
The size shown for "ls -l /proc/kcore" is not supposed to be the size of memory, but rather it is total amount of address space used by the kernel plus various pseudo-device headers. The total memory size reported by /proc/meminfo is more relevant, although that doesn't include the amount occupied by the BIOS and certain reserved regions (e.g., static kernel text and data).