gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 11:33:20AM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
> > In a nutshell, the memory usage accounting for the system processes is
> > busted.  Just ignore it for those processes.
> 
> While I understand that this discussion may live better in tech-kern,
> I don't think Amit's question is without merit... will top ever
> learn how to grok kernel thread's memory usage? What part of UVM is
> confusing it?

Their memory usage isn't really well-defined in the same way that a
normal process's is; they all use the shared kernel memory. I suppose
we could make them all show up with RES of 0; would that really be an
improvement? 

(This is similar to the problem with looking at multiple clone'd
processes, either here or on Linux, when you have several PIDs that
have the same VM space and hence report the same memory usage. "Wy do
I have 20 java processes, and they're 50M *each*?")

        - Nathan