docs: proc.rst: meminfo: briefly describe gaps in memory accounting

Add a paragraph that explains that it may happen that the counters in
/proc/meminfo do not add up to the overall memory usage.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210421061127.1182723-1-rppt@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
index 81bfe3c800ccffb2859dc93b2f899b7e75a3270c..dd4e3e18c22bcc0b169ead6e9bdac73e60f707f1 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
@@ -933,8 +933,15 @@ meminfo
 ~~~~~~~
 
 Provides information about distribution and utilization of memory.  This
-varies by architecture and compile options.  The following is from a
-16GB PIII, which has highmem enabled.  You may not have all of these fields.
+varies by architecture and compile options.  Some of the counters reported
+here overlap.  The memory reported by the non overlapping counters may not
+add up to the overall memory usage and the difference for some workloads
+can be substantial.  In many cases there are other means to find out
+additional memory using subsystem specific interfaces, for instance
+/proc/net/sockstat for TCP memory allocations.
+
+The following is from a 16GB PIII, which has highmem enabled.
+You may not have all of these fields.
 
 ::