Gradually vanishing total over time for Active+Inact+Laundry+Wired+Free as seen in top (14.1-RELEASE at least)

This note is based on:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=280846

comments 9 and 11. (I'm not the person that reported the
issue. I do not run 14.1-RELEASE .)

Comment 9 was about duplicating a ZFS context to UFS media
and then booting that UFS media, no ZFS file systems. It
continued to have the property that
Active+Inact+Laundry+Wired+Free decreased over time. It
turned out zfs_enable="YES" had been left in place so that
ZFS was loaded but otherwise unused. Reported after some
use was (for a system with 8 GiBytes of RAM):

QUOTE [of text from top, other than the "(empty . . .)" note]
Mem: 28M Active, 76M Inact, 76M Laundry, 1464M Wired, 642M Buf, 369M Free
ARC: (empty, of course)
END QUOTE

Comment 11 was about then doing a "kldunload zfs.ko". That
resulted in (shown by another run of top):

QUOTE
Mem: 1536M Active, 1590M Inact, 306M Laundry, 1371M Wired, 603M Buf, 221M Free
END QUOTE

(No ARC, as expected.)

So it appears that zfs.ko being loaded was sufficient for
memory to gradually land in (effectively) a "Mem:" category
that top does not report. (Possibly the system does not
report/track more generally?)

But: 1536+1590+306+1371+221 == 5024

So it still does not total close to 8192 .


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com