illumos gate

The swap and free columns are presented in kilobytes by vmstat today. On modern systems with gigabytes of memory this creates very large numbers that are hard to read. I propose a quick change that does not brake any existing scripts and with minimal code change by implementing a new switch, '-m' that scales these two fields to megabytes instead.

This would make it much more readable for a few years, while keeping enough fine grain to see if a system is increasing memory usage or releasing memory. It will also make the output column match with the header again for most systems and make make more output fit on a single line for those of us who still use 80x24 terminal windows.

Another option would be to include a "-h" option for human readably format like ls, fsstat and other tools. This could however decrease the resolution and require more code/duplication of code ( I don't think there are any suitable scale functions? ) while also making it harder to use the output for scripting.

I've done a simple implementation of this for my own use, I would be glad to clean up the few lines and make this my first contribution.

Example
Today:

$ vmstat 5 2
 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr f0 s0 s1 s3   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0 10026184 6946024 32 127 0 0 0  0 62  1  2  1  3  770  444  591  0  1 99
 0 0 0 9897380 6802728 12 59 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  847  164  558  0  0 100

$ vmstat -m 5 2
 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr f0 s0 s1 s3   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0   9791  6783  32 127  0  0  0  0 62  1  2  0  3  770  443  591  0  1 99
 1 0 0   9665  6643  11  58  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1 10  816  171  555  0  1 99