> I would hope that the system knows precisely what is using every single byte of physical and virtual memory.

Of course the system knows what is using every page. The difficulty is really in how to account for pages that are backed by disk.

If you count all of those as free, that's not accurate. If you count all of those as used, that's not accurate either. Additionally, FreeBSD (at least) doesn't have separate queues for disk backed pages, so there's not really a good way to know how much of your active (or inactive) memory is disk backed.

As an additional caveat that measuring active/inactive has costs. In the past, FreeBSD wouldn't really do the work for that until it needed to... I know some stuff changed, but I don't remember where it ended up; it wasn't great when it bulk marked a ton of pages as inactive and then the active ones would fault back in.

This is only really a problem if you accept overcommit as a force of nature that can't be changed or tweaked (you can still do address space reservation without needing overcommit)

If you don't, it becomes rather easy (and strict commit accounting is done for example on Linux even if it isn't used in some cases)

Memory mapped files can be entirely recreated from the disk so no need to charge for them. Anonymous pages (whether private or shareable) have to be charged. Shareable memory is the harder one to charge. (The case where a mapping is used by only one can get charged as private commit.) These two previous cases are charged even if in a swap file or whatnot

> If you count all of those as free, that’s not accurate.

Why not? It depends on what you’re measuring. Physical memory? They count as free. Virtual memory? They count as used.

The ambiguities only arise when we stop making that distinction very clear.