ps output: rss vs vmsize

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 24 July 2006 5:10 am, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> the current ps utility claims to output vmsize (procps/ps.c:ps_main() does a 
> printf with VmSize in the header) but in reality it displays rss 
> (libbb/procps.c:procps_scan() reads in the rss value and the variable name 
> is "rss")
> 
> so the question is, which do we want ?  vmsize or rss ?  i'd be a bit biased 
> and say change the code to read vmsize because in nommu ports for uClinux, 
> the rss field is broken (always 0)

Hmmm...  (ctrl-alt-google...)

http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2006/03/memory-usage-with-smaps.html

Looks like the both suck.  Hard to form a strong opinion here.

Ideally we'd want private rss and shared rss as two separate fields.  (rss - 
private should get that pretty easily).  I hate to be that kernel version 
specific, though.

Sigh, I've had "upgrade ps" as a todo item forever because I keep typing "ps 
ax" out of sheer habit and the thing just BARFS...  Do we have an easy way to 
detect MMU-itude?

Ow ow ow.  After spending most of today reading old uClibc svn entries to make 
a changelog for 0.9.28 (I'm up to 10609), reading the ps man page is not fun 
right now.

Ok, how about just making it actually print out vmsize like it claims to for 
right now, and putting a couple sentences on the rest of the issue in the 
TODO list?

> -mike

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.