Linux Memory Management Documentation

Memory Management Guide

This is a guide to understanding the memory management subsystem of Linux. If you are looking for advice on simply allocating memory, see the Memory Allocation Guide. For controlling and tuning guides, see the admin guide.

• Physical Memory
• Page Tables
• Process Addresses
• Boot Memory
• Page Allocation
• Virtually Contiguous Memory Allocation
• Slab Allocation
• High Memory Handling
• Page Reclaim
• Swap
• Page Cache
• Shared Memory Filesystem
• Out Of Memory Handling

Legacy Documentation

This is a collection of older documents about the Linux memory management (MM) subsystem internals with different level of details ranging from notes and mailing list responses for elaborating descriptions of data structures and algorithms. It should all be integrated nicely into the above structured documentation, or deleted if it has served its purpose.

• Active MM
• Architecture Page Table Helpers
• Memory Balancing
• DAMON: Data Access MONitor
• Free Page Reporting
• Frontswap
• Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM)
• hwpoison
• Hugetlbfs Reservation
• Kernel Samepage Merging
• Physical Memory Model
• When do you need to notify inside page table lock ?
• What is NUMA?
• Overcommit Accounting
• Page migration
• Page fragments
• page owner: Tracking about who allocated each page
• Page Table Check
• remap_file_pages() system call
• Short users guide for SLUB
• Split page table lock
• Transparent Hugepage Support
• Unevictable LRU Infrastructure
• Virtually Mapped Kernel Stack Support
• A vmemmap diet for HugeTLB and Device DAX
• z3fold
• zsmalloc