I turned to pp_kernel (in kstat output and available to an unprivileged user)
and memstat (now 'wickedly' fast and still root-only) to help me accurately
determine kernel memory usage. What I see is that pp_kernel ALWAYS reports a
higher kernel memory utilization, sometimes as much as 800%(!), but typically
around 30-50%. Here is some representative output:
# kstat | grep pp_kernel
pp_kernel 67961 <--- ~530 MB
#
# echo "::memstat" | mdb -k
Page Summary Pages MB %Tot
------------------ ---------------- ---------------- ------
Kernel 51454 401 20%
Anon 56093 438 22%
Exec and libs 6717 52 3%
Page cache 31851 248 12%
Free (cachelist) 67369 526 26%
Free (freelist) 43385 338 17%
Total 256869 2006
Physical 255491 1996
#
Others are seeing similar results and ZFS does not seem to change the general
observation.
My requests:
- can someone please comment, or provide insight, on the preferred method for
accurately accounting for kernel memory in Solaris?
- what is missing from the math that kstat is doing (see lines 923-931 in
kstat_fr.c) that makes its result is so different than the simple vnode kvp
counting performed by memstat?
Thanks.
-- Jeff
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