OSS + ELC EU 2026

This talk will cover several memory management concepts and underlying principles to give the audience a better understanding about what happens to the RAM on a Linux system, and how to determine that on their own system, namely:

- how much memory is used by userspace processes, the page cache, and the kernel itself
- how to determine accurately how much memory is used by individual processes
- why free memory is always eventually exhausted and what happens then
- how to observe what the kernel is doing to make memory available for allocations, and recognize when it's struggling
- what is the role of swap and why not fear swapping

This includes explaining some key parts of files like /proc/meminfo and /proc/vmstat.