How do I reconcile 'top' and 'free -m''s memory usage reporting in linux? -

Free-M I can see that 377 MB of memory and 1649 MB free See below for the actual output of the machine (1567 of which is cached by Ubuntu):

  caz @ riskvm: ~ $ free -m Free shared buffers used in cash mum: 2026 1975 51 0 30 1567 - / + buffers / cache: 377 1649 swap: 3153 87 3065  

However, when I look at the output of top , then I Using GB and 273 MB in SES column I can see the verbs. RES stands for the top man page in non-swap physical memory.

  top - 11:45:26 up 1 day, 38 minutes, 3 users, load average: 0.27, 0.21, 0.23 work: 125 total, 1 running, 123 is sleeping, 0 paused, 1 zombie cpu: 0.2% us, 6.6% se, 0.0% ni, 92.8% id, 0.5% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% c, 0.0% cent memory: 2075560 total, 2023796 used, 51764k Free, 31264 buffer swap: 3229024 total, 89764k used, 3139260k free, cached PID user PR ni virit SRR SRR c% CPU% muse time + command 6689 root 20 0 1242 m 1.0 g 1.0 Live S 13 51.1 292: 59.21 VMWAR-VMX 6658 Route 20 0 492 M 273 M 262 MS 2 13.5 41: 16.75 VMWare-VMX 1 Route 20 0 2844 536 484 S 0.0 0: 01.50 RTI 2 Route 15 -5 0 S 0 0.0 0: 00.00 Kathredded 3 Root RT-5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0.0 Migration / 0  

I understand that some of those other processes (shared objects and the like) Has been shared. But if 1 GB memory is shared by other processes, at least it should be used at least?

How do the Free report use 377 MB of memory and when I look at the top see processes that use 1GB and more RES memory?

top in graphics card, NIC and other "non-RAM" memory Things like mmpad framebuffers include: Memory reported by Free is strictly RAM + swap.