Comment Comment by dekhn no, the kernel maintains other allocated objects (dentry, inode caches) that it can't swap out. Under memory pressure, those get dropped before application pages. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17936/setting-proc-... and https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111893/how-long-do-...I've found the linux memory system to be far too complicated to understand for quite some time, compared to what's documented in, for example, The Design and Implementation of The FreeBSD Operating System, for a more comprehensible system. parent dekhn 5 years ago
I've found the linux memory system to be far too complicated to understand for quite some time, compared to what's documented in, for example, The Design and Implementation of The FreeBSD Operating System, for a more comprehensible system.