Buffers

Buffers are the disk block representation of the data that is stored under the page caches. Buffers contains the metadata of the files/data which resides under the page cache. Example: When there is a request of any data which is present in the page cache, first the kernel checks the data in the buffers which contain the metadata which points to the actual files/data contained in the page caches. Once from the metadata the actual block address of the file is known, it is picked up by the kernel for processing.

• /proc/meminfo
• free

https://s905060.gitbooks.io/site-reliability/engineer-handbook/content/buffer-and-cache.html