I often see Freeing unused kernel memory: xxxK (......)
from dmesg
, but I can never find this log from kernel source code with the help of grep/rg.
Where does it come from?
That line of text does not exist as a single, complete string, hence your failure to grep it.
This all gets rolling when free_initmem() in init/main.c calls free_initmem_default().
The line in question originates from free_initmem_default() in include/linux/mm.h:
/*
* Default method to free all the __init memory into the buddy system.
* The freed pages will be poisoned with pattern "poison" if it's within
* range [0, UCHAR_MAX].
* Return pages freed into the buddy system.
*/
static inline unsigned long free_initmem_default(int poison)
{
extern char __init_begin[], __init_end[];
return free_reserved_area(&__init_begin, &__init_end,
poison, "unused kernel");
}
The rest of that text is from free_reserved_area() in mm/page_alloc.c:
unsigned long free_reserved_area(void *start, void *end, int poison, const char *s)
{
void *pos;
unsigned long pages = 0;
...
if (pages && s)
pr_info("Freeing %s memory: %ldK\n",
s, pages << (PAGE_SHIFT - 10));
return pages;
}
(Code excerpts from v5.2)