System Monitoring with vmstat

The following results were obtained based on data collected using vmstat, a tool that reports a system's virtual memory statistics.

Monitoring the system

In order to reproduce the shown output, one should:

Build core-image-minimal

$ git clone git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky
$ cd poky/
$ source oe-init-build-env
$ bitbake core-image-minimal

Move the download directory to a different location than build

$ pwd
/home/user/poky/build/
$ mv downloads/ ../

Remove build/ and re-build core-image-minimal from scratch, but this time, monitoring the system with vmstat

$ cd ../
$ pwd
/home/user/poky/
$ rm -rf build/
$ source oe-init-build-env
$ echo -e "DL_DIR = "/home/user/poky/downloads" \nBB_NO_NETWORK = "1"" > conf/auto.conf
$ bitbake core-image-minimal
# In another terminal right at the same time bitbake starts running run the following:
$ vmstat 2 > vmstat-output.raw