================= Memory Management

Linux memory management subsystem is responsible, as the name implies, for managing the memory in the system. This includes implemnetation of virtual memory and demand paging, memory allocation both for kernel internal structures and user space programms, mapping of files into processes address space and many other cool things.

Linux memory management is a complex system with many configurable settings. Most of these settings are available via /proc filesystem and can be quired and adjusted using sysctl. These APIs are described in Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst and in man 5 proc_.

.. _man 5 proc: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html

Linux memory management has its own jargon and if you are not yet familiar with it, consider reading :ref:Documentation/admin-guide/mm/concepts.rst <mm_concepts>.

Here we document in detail how to interact with various mechanisms in the Linux memory management.

.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1

concepts cma_debugfs hugetlbpage idle_page_tracking ksm memory-hotplug nommu-mmap numa_memory_policy numaperf pagemap soft-dirty transhuge userfaultfd