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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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sysinfo(2) System Calls Manual sysinfo(2)
sysinfo - return system information
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <sys/sysinfo.h>
int sysinfo(struct sysinfo *info);
sysinfo() returns certain statistics on memory and swap usage, as
well as the load average.
Until Linux 2.3.16, sysinfo() returned information in the
following structure:
struct sysinfo {
long uptime; /* Seconds since boot */
unsigned long loads[3]; /* 1, 5, and 15 minute load averages */
unsigned long totalram; /* Total usable main memory size */
unsigned long freeram; /* Available memory size */
unsigned long sharedram; /* Amount of shared memory */
unsigned long bufferram; /* Memory used by buffers */
unsigned long totalswap; /* Total swap space size */
unsigned long freeswap; /* Swap space still available */
unsigned short procs; /* Number of current processes */
char _f[22]; /* Pads structure to 64 bytes */
};
In the above structure, the sizes of the memory and swap fields
are given in bytes.
Since Linux 2.3.23 (i386) and Linux 2.3.48 (all architectures) the
structure is:
struct sysinfo {
long uptime; /* Seconds since boot */
unsigned long loads[3]; /* 1, 5, and 15 minute load averages */
unsigned long totalram; /* Total usable main memory size */
unsigned long freeram; /* Available memory size */
unsigned long sharedram; /* Amount of shared memory */
unsigned long bufferram; /* Memory used by buffers */
unsigned long totalswap; /* Total swap space size */
unsigned long freeswap; /* Swap space still available */
unsigned short procs; /* Number of current processes */
unsigned long totalhigh; /* Total high memory size */
unsigned long freehigh; /* Available high memory size */
unsigned int mem_unit; /* Memory unit size in bytes */
char _f[20-2*sizeof(long)-sizeof(int)];
/* Padding to 64 bytes */
};
In the above structure, sizes of the memory and swap fields are
given as multiples of mem_unit bytes.
On success, sysinfo() returns zero. On error, -1 is returned, and
errno is set to indicate the error.
EFAULT info is not a valid address.
Linux.
Linux 0.98.pl6.
All of the information provided by this system call is also
available via /proc/meminfo and /proc/loadavg.
proc(5)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
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⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
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Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 sysinfo(2)
Pages that refer to this page: syscalls(2), get_phys_pages(3)