What is difference between total and free memory

Question

I have a desktop system where Centos 7 is installed. It has 4 core and 12 GB memory. In order to find memory information I use free -h command. I have one confusion.

[user@xyz-hi ~]$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            11G        4.6G        231M         94M        6.8G        6.6G
Swap:          3.9G        104M        3.8G

In total column, It is saying that total in 11GB (that's correct), in last column available, it is saying that 6.6GB and used is 4.6G.

If used memory is 4.6GB then remaining should be 6.4 GB (11-4.6=6.4). What is correct interpretation of above output What is the difference between total and available and free memory? Am I out of memory is above case if I need 1 GB more for some new application?

Solution

man free command solve my problem.

DESCRIPTION
       free  displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap mem‐
       ory in the system, as well as the buffers and caches used by  the  ker‐
       nel.  The  information  is  gathered by parsing /proc/meminfo. The dis‐
       played columns are:

       total  Total installed memory (MemTotal and SwapTotal in /proc/meminfo)

       used   Used memory (calculated as total - free - buffers - cache)

       free   Unused memory (MemFree and SwapFree in /proc/meminfo)

       shared Memory used (mostly) by tmpfs (Shmem in /proc/meminfo, available
              on kernels 2.6.32, displayed as zero if not available)

       buffers
              Memory used by kernel buffers (Buffers in /proc/meminfo)

       cache  Memory  used  by  the  page  cache and slabs (Cached and Slab in
              /proc/meminfo)

       buff/cache
              Sum of buffers and cache

       available
              Estimation of how much memory  is  available  for  starting  new
              applications,  without swapping. Unlike the data provided by the
              cache or free fields, this field takes into account  page  cache
              and also that not all reclaimable memory slabs will be reclaimed
              due to items being in use (MemAvailable in /proc/meminfo, avail‐
              able on kernels 3.14, emulated on kernels 2.6.27+, otherwise the
              same as free)