Linux: /proc deep dive
What is /proc exactly?
Let’s start by stating that /proc isn’t a regular filesystem. Don’t believe me? good, let’s take a closer look
~ df /proc
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
proc 0 0 0 - /proc
Interesting, a filesystem with 0 blocks used although there are files under /proc
/proc is also not listed in /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/fedora-root / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=0ablip2-e5blop2-5lol4-6mario5 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/fedora-home /home ext4 defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/fedora-swap swap swap defaults 0 0
This is because /proc resides in the RAM. It’s available only when you are running the operating system as opposed to other filesystems that reside on the disk itself and data there can be inspected on another hardware.
You can’t create files under /proc. Let’s give it a try
touch file
touch: cannot touch 'file': No such file or directory
Later on we’ll see that although we can’t create new files there, we can modify existing files which will affect the kernel behaviour.
So we are now pretty sure it’s not a regular filesystem, but we didn’t answer the question “What is it?”
/proc is known as a virtual filesystem (for reasons we explained above). It holds runtime system information which can be categorized into two categories - performances and processes. Let’s deep dive and see what we can find there.
/proc/meminfo - Memory Information
MemTotal: 32247880 kB # Total physical RAM you have in your system (used + unused)
MemFree: 3432720 kB # The amount of unused physical RAM in your system
MemAvailable: 21118008 kB # The amount of available memory for running new apps/workloads (without pushing system to use swap) based
on MemFree, Active(file), Inactive(file), and SReclaimable and the watermarks from /proc/zoneinfo.
Buffers: 4778704 kB # Reserved place in RAM which is used to hold data for temporary purpose
Cached: 10015396 kB # Cache is usually used when processes reading and writing to the disk to make the process faster by making similar data used by different programs easily accessible.
SwapCached: 0 kB # How much of the memory is also in swapfile (for increased performances)
Active: 17366256 kB # How much memory was accessed recently (recently is not time based but activity and memory pressure based
Inactive: 4904752 kB
Active(anon): 8189116 kB
Inactive(anon): 718336 kB
Active(file): 9177140 kB
Inactive(file): 4186416 kB
Unevictable: 828916 kB
Mlocked: 179112 kB
SwapTotal: 16220156 kB
SwapFree: 16220156 kB
Dirty: 860 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 8305412 kB
Mapped: 1326808 kB
Shmem: 1379852 kB
KReclaimable: 4791664 kB
Slab: 5256456 kB
SReclaimable: 4791664 kB
SUnreclaim: 464792 kB
KernelStack: 30868 kB
PageTables: 132424 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 32344096 kB
Committed_AS: 32145288 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 58112 kB
VmallocChunk: 0 kB
Percpu: 39776 kB
HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 0 kB
ShmemHugePages: 0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped: 0 kB
CmaTotal: 0 kB
CmaFree: 0 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
Hugetlb: 0 kB
DirectMap4k: 920856 kB
DirectMap2M: 28839936 kB
DirectMap1G: 4194304 kB
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