proc_buddyinfo(5) — Linux manual page

NAME | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

proc_buddyinfo(5)          File Formats Manual          proc_buddyinfo(5)

NAME         top

       /proc/buddyinfo - memory fragmentation

DESCRIPTION         top

       /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         top

       proc(5)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.10.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2025-02-02.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux man-pages 6.10            2024-05-02              proc_buddyinfo(5)