Comment 5 for bug 240073

Our policy is to use the most appropriate unit that might be expected.

For disk sizes and partitioning, we use thousands of bytes since that is what disk manufacturers use. This means that a drive that is termed by the manufacturer as 80 GB will be shown as 80 GB.

For memory sizes and RAM, we use multiples of 1,024 bytes, since that is what RAM manufacturers use. This means that a computer with 2 GB of RAM will be shown as 2 GB.

Since ifconfig deals with bytes streamed, you can arguably claim it should be multiples of 1,024 or multiples of 1,000. Someone just needs to decide.

I would argue that we should use 1,024 since that is congruous with the power-of-2 relationship between Bytes and bits (and Bytes-per-second and bits-per-second). But I'm willing to debate that with someone with a better argument.

We absolutely _do_not_ use the "KiB", "MiB" or "GiB" forms anywhere! These should never be displayed, they are wrong for many reasons[0], have never been adopted outside of the pedant community, and simply confuse users.