Commit graph

64 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Eric W. Biederman
86926d0096 sysctl: Remove CTL_NONE and CTL_UNNUMBERED
Now that the sysctl structures no longer have a ctl_name field
there is no reason to retain the definitions for CTL_NONE and
CTL_UNNUMBERED, or to explain their historic usage.

Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
2009-11-18 08:14:55 -08:00
Linus Torvalds
db16826367 Merge branch 'hwpoison' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-mce-2.6
* 'hwpoison' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-mce-2.6: (21 commits)
  HWPOISON: Enable error_remove_page on btrfs
  HWPOISON: Add simple debugfs interface to inject hwpoison on arbitary PFNs
  HWPOISON: Add madvise() based injector for hardware poisoned pages v4
  HWPOISON: Enable error_remove_page for NFS
  HWPOISON: Enable .remove_error_page for migration aware file systems
  HWPOISON: The high level memory error handler in the VM v7
  HWPOISON: Add PR_MCE_KILL prctl to control early kill behaviour per process
  HWPOISON: shmem: call set_page_dirty() with locked page
  HWPOISON: Define a new error_remove_page address space op for async truncation
  HWPOISON: Add invalidate_inode_page
  HWPOISON: Refactor truncate to allow direct truncating of page v2
  HWPOISON: check and isolate corrupted free pages v2
  HWPOISON: Handle hardware poisoned pages in try_to_unmap
  HWPOISON: Use bitmask/action code for try_to_unmap behaviour
  HWPOISON: x86: Add VM_FAULT_HWPOISON handling to x86 page fault handler v2
  HWPOISON: Add poison check to page fault handling
  HWPOISON: Add basic support for poisoned pages in fault handler v3
  HWPOISON: Add new SIGBUS error codes for hardware poison signals
  HWPOISON: Add support for poison swap entries v2
  HWPOISON: Export some rmap vma locking to outside world
  ...
2009-09-24 07:53:22 -07:00
Neil Horman
a293980c2e exec: let do_coredump() limit the number of concurrent dumps to pipes
Introduce core pipe limiting sysctl.

Since we can dump cores to pipe, rather than directly to the filesystem,
we create a condition in which a user can create a very high load on the
system simply by running bad applications.

If the pipe reader specified in core_pattern is poorly written, we can
have lots of ourstandig resources and processes in the system.

This sysctl introduces an ability to limit that resource consumption.
core_pipe_limit defines how many in-flight dumps may be run in parallel,
dumps beyond this value are skipped and a note is made in the kernel log.
A special value of 0 in core_pipe_limit denotes unlimited core dumps may
be handled (this is the default value).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>
Reported-by: Earl Chew <earl_chew@agilent.com>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-24 07:21:00 -07:00
Xiaotian Feng
bcadbbd4c8 Documentation: update stale definition of file-nr in fs.txt
In "documentation: update Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt and
Documentation/sysctls" (commit 760df93ec) we merged /proc/sys/fs
documentation in Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt and
Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt, but stale file-nr definition
remained.

This patch adds back the right fs-nr definition for 2.6 kernel.

Signed-off-by: Xiaotian Feng<dfeng@redhat.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-24 07:20:57 -07:00
Dave Young
af91322ef3 printk: add printk_delay to make messages readable for some scenarios
When syslog is not possible, at the same time there's no serial/net
console available, it will be hard to read the printk messages.  For
example oops/panic/warning messages in shutdown phase.

Add a printk delay feature, we can make each printk message delay some
milliseconds.

Setting the delay by proc/sysctl interface: /proc/sys/kernel/printk_delay

The value range from 0 - 10000, default value is 0

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix a few things]
Signed-off-by: Dave Young <hidave.darkstar@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-23 07:39:28 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
342ff1a1b5 Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial: (34 commits)
  trivial: fix typo in aic7xxx comment
  trivial: fix comment typo in drivers/ata/pata_hpt37x.c
  trivial: typo in kernel-parameters.txt
  trivial: fix typo in tracing documentation
  trivial: add __init/__exit macros in drivers/gpio/bt8xxgpio.c
  trivial: add __init macro/ fix of __exit macro location in ipmi_poweroff.c
  trivial: remove unnecessary semicolons
  trivial: Fix duplicated word "options" in comment
  trivial: kbuild: remove extraneous blank line after declaration of usage()
  trivial: improve help text for mm debug config options
  trivial: doc: hpfall: accept disk device to unload as argument
  trivial: doc: hpfall: reduce risk that hpfall can do harm
  trivial: SubmittingPatches: Fix reference to renumbered step
  trivial: fix typos "man[ae]g?ment" -> "management"
  trivial: media/video/cx88: add __init/__exit macros to cx88 drivers
  trivial: fix typo in CONFIG_DEBUG_FS in gcov doc
  trivial: fix missing printk space in amd_k7_smp_check
  trivial: fix typo s/ketymap/keymap/ in comment
  trivial: fix typo "to to" in multiple files
  trivial: fix typos in comments s/DGBU/DBGU/
  ...
2009-09-22 07:51:45 -07:00
Jan Kara
55c37a840d vm: document that setting vfs_cache_pressure to 0 isn't a good idea
Reported-by: Christian Thaeter <ct@pipapo.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-22 07:17:30 -07:00
Horst Schirmeier
b7f5ab6fbb trivial: doc: document missing value 2 for randomize-va-space
The documentation for /proc/sys/kernel/* does not mention the possible
value 2 for randomize-va-space yet.  While being there, doing some
reformatting, fixing grammar problems and clarifying the correlations
between randomize-va-space, kernel parameter "norandmaps" and the
CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK option.

Signed-off-by: Horst Schirmeier <horst@schirmeier.com>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2009-09-21 15:14:53 +02:00
Andi Kleen
6a46079cf5 HWPOISON: The high level memory error handler in the VM v7
Add the high level memory handler that poisons pages
that got corrupted by hardware (typically by a two bit flip in a DIMM
or a cache) on the Linux level. The goal is to prevent everyone
from accessing these pages in the future.

This done at the VM level by marking a page hwpoisoned
and doing the appropriate action based on the type of page
it is.

The code that does this is portable and lives in mm/memory-failure.c

To quote the overview comment:

High level machine check handler. Handles pages reported by the
hardware as being corrupted usually due to a 2bit ECC memory or cache
failure.

This focuses on pages detected as corrupted in the background.
When the current CPU tries to consume corruption the currently
running process can just be killed directly instead. This implies
that if the error cannot be handled for some reason it's safe to
just ignore it because no corruption has been consumed yet. Instead
when that happens another machine check will happen.

Handles page cache pages in various states. The tricky part
here is that we can access any page asynchronous to other VM
users, because memory failures could happen anytime and anywhere,
possibly violating some of their assumptions. This is why this code
has to be extremely careful. Generally it tries to use normal locking
rules, as in get the standard locks, even if that means the
error handling takes potentially a long time.

Some of the operations here are somewhat inefficient and have non
linear algorithmic complexity, because the data structures have not
been optimized for this case. This is in particular the case
for the mapping from a vma to a process. Since this case is expected
to be rare we hope we can get away with this.

There are in principle two strategies to kill processes on poison:
- just unmap the data and wait for an actual reference before
killing
- kill as soon as corruption is detected.
Both have advantages and disadvantages and should be used
in different situations. Right now both are implemented and can
be switched with a new sysctl vm.memory_failure_early_kill
The default is early kill.

The patch does some rmap data structure walking on its own to collect
processes to kill. This is unusual because normally all rmap data structure
knowledge is in rmap.c only. I put it here for now to keep
everything together and rmap knowledge has been seeping out anyways

Includes contributions from Johannes Weiner, Chris Mason, Fengguang Wu,
Nick Piggin (who did a lot of great work) and others.

Cc: npiggin@suse.de
Cc: riel@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Hidehiro Kawai <hidehiro.kawai.ez@hitachi.com>
2009-09-16 11:50:15 +02:00
Hans-Joachim Picht
c114728af2 [S390] add call home support
Signed-off-by: Hans-Joachim Picht <hans@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
2009-09-11 10:29:49 +02:00
Mel Gorman
90afa5de6f vmscan: properly account for the number of page cache pages zone_reclaim() can reclaim
A bug was brought to my attention against a distro kernel but it affects
mainline and I believe problems like this have been reported in various
guises on the mailing lists although I don't have specific examples at the
moment.

The reported problem was that malloc() stalled for a long time (minutes in
some cases) if a large tmpfs mount was occupying a large percentage of
memory overall.  The pages did not get cleaned or reclaimed by
zone_reclaim() because the zone_reclaim_mode was unsuitable, but the lists
are uselessly scanned frequencly making the CPU spin at near 100%.

This patchset intends to address that bug and bring the behaviour of
zone_reclaim() more in line with expectations which were noticed during
investigation.  It is based on top of mmotm and takes advantage of
Kosaki's work with respect to zone_reclaim().

Patch 1 fixes the heuristics that zone_reclaim() uses to determine if the
	scan should go ahead. The broken heuristic is what was causing the
	malloc() stall as it uselessly scanned the LRU constantly. Currently,
	zone_reclaim is assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 and historically it
	could not deal with tmpfs pages at all. This fixes up the heuristic so
	that an unnecessary scan is more likely to be correctly avoided.

Patch 2 notes that zone_reclaim() returning a failure automatically means
	the zone is marked full. This is not always true. It could have
	failed because the GFP mask or zone_reclaim_mode were unsuitable.

Patch 3 introduces a counter zreclaim_failed that will increment each
	time the zone_reclaim scan-avoidance heuristics fail. If that
	counter is rapidly increasing, then zone_reclaim_mode should be
	set to 0 as a temporarily resolution and a bug reported because
	the scan-avoidance heuristic is still broken.

This patch:

On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that
is a more targetted form of direct reclaim.  On machines with large NUMA
distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that
clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not
being met.

There is a heuristic that determines if the scan is worthwhile but the
problem is that the heuristic is not being properly applied and is
basically assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 if it is enabled.  The lack of
proper detection can manfiest as high CPU usage as the LRU list is scanned
uselessly.

Historically, once enabled it was depending on NR_FILE_PAGES which may
include swapcache pages that the reclaim_mode cannot deal with.  Patch
vmscan-change-the-number-of-the-unmapped-files-in-zone-reclaim.patch by
Kosaki Motohiro noted that zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES) included
pages that were not file-backed such as swapcache and made a calculation
based on the inactive, active and mapped files.  This is far superior when
zone_reclaim==1 but if RECLAIM_SWAP is set, then NR_FILE_PAGES is a
reasonable starting figure.

This patch alters how zone_reclaim() works out how many pages it might be
able to reclaim given the current reclaim_mode.  If RECLAIM_SWAP is set in
the reclaim_mode it will either consider NR_FILE_PAGES as potential
candidates or else use NR_{IN}ACTIVE}_PAGES-NR_FILE_MAPPED to discount
swapcache and other non-file-backed pages.  If RECLAIM_WRITE is not set,
then NR_FILE_DIRTY number of pages are not candidates.  If RECLAIM_SWAP is
not set, then NR_FILE_MAPPED are not.

[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: Estimate unmapped pages minus tmpfs pages]
[fengguang.wu@intel.com: Fix underflow problem in Kosaki's estimate]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-06-16 19:47:45 -07:00
Mel Gorman
418589663d page allocator: use allocation flags as an index to the zone watermark
ALLOC_WMARK_MIN, ALLOC_WMARK_LOW and ALLOC_WMARK_HIGH determin whether
pages_min, pages_low or pages_high is used as the zone watermark when
allocating the pages.  Two branches in the allocator hotpath determine
which watermark to use.

This patch uses the flags as an array index into a watermark array that is
indexed with WMARK_* defines accessed via helpers.  All call sites that
use zone->pages_* are updated to use the helpers for accessing the values
and the array offsets for setting.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-06-16 19:47:35 -07:00
Matt LaPlante
19f5946001 trivial: Miscellaneous documentation typo fixes
Fix various typos in documentation txts.

Signed-off-by: Matt LaPlante <kernel1@cyberdogtech.com>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2009-06-12 18:01:47 +02:00
James Morris
2c9e703c61 Merge branch 'master' into next
Conflicts:
	fs/exec.c

Removed IMA changes (the IMA checks are now performed via may_open()).

Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
2009-05-22 18:40:59 +10:00
Jens Axboe
cd17cbfda0 Revert "mm: add /proc controls for pdflush threads"
This reverts commit fafd688e4c.

Work is progressing to switch away from pdflush as the process backing
for flushing out dirty data. So it seems pointless to add more knobs
to control pdflush threads. The original author of the patch did not
have any specific use cases for adding the knobs, so we can easily
revert this before 2.6.30 to avoid having to maintain this API
forever.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-05-15 11:32:24 +02:00
James Morris
d254117099 Merge branch 'master' into next 2009-05-08 17:56:47 +10:00
Andrea Righi
9e4a5bda89 mm: prevent divide error for small values of vm_dirty_bytes
Avoid setting less than two pages for vm_dirty_bytes: this is necessary to
avoid potential division by 0 (like the following) in get_dirty_limits().

[   49.951610] divide error: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP
[   49.952195] last sysfs file: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda/uevent
[   49.952195] CPU 1
[   49.952195] Modules linked in: pcspkr
[   49.952195] Pid: 3064, comm: dd Not tainted 2.6.30-rc3 #1
[   49.952195] RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff802d39a9>]  [<ffffffff802d39a9>] get_dirty_limits+0xe9/0x2c0
[   49.952195] RSP: 0018:ffff88001de03a98  EFLAGS: 00010202
[   49.952195] RAX: 00000000000000c0 RBX: ffff88001de03b80 RCX: 28f5c28f5c28f5c3
[   49.952195] RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 00000000000000c0 RDI: 0000000000000000
[   49.952195] RBP: ffff88001de03ae8 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: 0000000000000000
[   49.952195] R10: ffff88001ddda9a0 R11: 0000000000000001 R12: 0000000000000001
[   49.952195] R13: ffff88001fbc8218 R14: ffff88001de03b70 R15: ffff88001de03b78
[   49.952195] FS:  00007fe9a435b6f0(0000) GS:ffff8800025d9000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
[   49.952195] CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
[   49.952195] CR2: 00007fe9a39ab000 CR3: 000000001de38000 CR4: 00000000000006e0
[   49.952195] DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
[   49.952195] DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000ffff0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
[   49.952195] Process dd (pid: 3064, threadinfo ffff88001de02000, task ffff88001ddda250)
[   49.952195] Stack:
[   49.952195]  ffff88001fa0de00 ffff88001f2dbd70 ffff88001f9fe800 000080b900000000
[   49.952195]  00000000000000c0 ffff8800027a6100 0000000000000400 ffff88001fbc8218
[   49.952195]  0000000000000000 0000000000000600 ffff88001de03bb8 ffffffff802d3ed7
[   49.952195] Call Trace:
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff802d3ed7>] balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr+0x1d7/0x3f0
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff80368f8e>] ? ext3_writeback_write_end+0x9e/0x120
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff802cc7df>] generic_file_buffered_write+0x12f/0x330
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff802cce8d>] __generic_file_aio_write_nolock+0x26d/0x460
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff802cda32>] ? generic_file_aio_write+0x52/0xd0
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff802cda49>] generic_file_aio_write+0x69/0xd0
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff80365fa6>] ext3_file_write+0x26/0xc0
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff803034d1>] do_sync_write+0xf1/0x140
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff80290d1a>] ? get_lock_stats+0x2a/0x60
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff80280730>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x40
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff8030411b>] vfs_write+0xcb/0x190
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff803042d0>] sys_write+0x50/0x90
[   49.952195]  [<ffffffff8022ff6b>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b
[   49.952195] Code: 00 00 00 2b 05 09 1c 17 01 48 89 c6 49 0f af f4 48 c1 ee 02 48 89 f0 48 f7 e1 48 89 d6 31 d2 48 c1 ee 02 48 0f af 75 d0 48 89 f0 <48> f7 f7 41 8b 95 ac 01 00 00 48 89 c7 49 0f af d4 48 c1 ea 02
[   49.952195] RIP  [<ffffffff802d39a9>] get_dirty_limits+0xe9/0x2c0
[   49.952195]  RSP <ffff88001de03a98>
[   50.096523] ---[ end trace 008d7aa02f244d7b ]---

Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-05-02 15:36:10 -07:00
Li Zefan
ca8b995029 Documentation/sysctl/net.txt: fix a typo
s/spicified/specified

Signed-off-by: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-04-13 15:04:28 -07:00
Peter W Morreale
fafd688e4c mm: add /proc controls for pdflush threads
Add /proc entries to give the admin the ability to control the minimum and
maximum number of pdflush threads.  This allows finer control of pdflush
on both large and small machines.

The rationale is simply one size does not fit all.  Admins on large and/or
small systems may want to tune the min/max pdflush thread count to best
suit their needs.  Right now the min/max is hardcoded to 2/8.  While
probably a fair estimate for smaller machines, large machines with large
numbers of CPUs and large numbers of filesystems/block devices may benefit
from larger numbers of threads working on different block devices.

Even if the background flushing algorithm is radically changed, it is
still likely that multiple threads will be involved and admins would still
desire finer control on the min/max other than to have to recompile the
kernel.

The patch adds '/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_min' and
'/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_max' with r/w permissions.

The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_min is 1 and the maximum value is
the current value of nr_pdflush_threads_max.  This minimum is required
since additional thread creation is performed in a pdflush thread itself.

The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_max is the current value of
nr_pdflush_threads_min and the maximum value can be 1000.

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt is also updated.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment, fix whitespace, use __read_mostly]
Signed-off-by: Peter W Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-04-07 08:31:03 -07:00
Li Xiaodong
45dad7bd9d documentation: fix unix_dgram_qlen description
Previous description about system parameter in /proc/sys/net/unix/ is
wrong (or missed).  Simply add a new description about unix_dgram_qlen
according to latest kernel.

Signed-off-by: Li Xiaodong <lixd@cn.fujitsu.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-04-02 19:04:53 -07:00
Shen Feng
760df93ecd documentation: update Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt and Documentation/sysctls
Now /proc/sys is described in many places and much information is
redundant.  This patch updates the proc.txt and move the /proc/sys
desciption out to the files in Documentation/sysctls.

Details are:

merge
-  2.1  /proc/sys/fs - File system data
-  2.11 /proc/sys/fs/mqueue - POSIX message queues filesystem
-  2.17 /proc/sys/fs/epoll - Configuration options for the epoll interface
with Documentation/sysctls/fs.txt.

remove
-  2.2  /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc - Miscellaneous binary formats
since it's not better then the Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt.

merge
-  2.3  /proc/sys/kernel - general kernel parameters
with Documentation/sysctls/kernel.txt

remove
-  2.5  /proc/sys/dev - Device specific parameters
since it's obsolete the sysfs is used now.

remove
-  2.6  /proc/sys/sunrpc - Remote procedure calls
since it's not better then the Documentation/sysctls/sunrpc.txt

move
-  2.7  /proc/sys/net - Networking stuff
-  2.9  Appletalk
-  2.10 IPX
to newly created Documentation/sysctls/net.txt.

remove
-  2.8  /proc/sys/net/ipv4 - IPV4 settings
since it's not better then the Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt.

add
- Chapter 3 Per-Process Parameters
to descibe /proc/<pid>/xxx parameters.

Signed-off-by: Shen Feng <shen@cn.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-04-02 19:04:53 -07:00
Kees Cook
3d43321b70 modules: sysctl to block module loading
Implement a sysctl file that disables module-loading system-wide since
there is no longer a viable way to remove CAP_SYS_MODULE after the system
bounding capability set was removed in 2.6.25.

Value can only be set to "1", and is tested only if standard capability
checks allow CAP_SYS_MODULE.  Given existing /dev/mem protections, this
should allow administrators a one-way method to block module loading
after initial boot-time module loading has finished.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees.cook@canonical.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
2009-04-03 11:47:11 +11:00
Peter W Morreale
db0fb1848a Update of Documentation: vm.txt and proc.txt
Update Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt and Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt.
 More specifically, the section on /proc/sys/vm in
Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt was removed and a link to
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt added.

Most of the verbiage from proc.txt was simply moved in vm.txt, with new
addtional text for "swappiness" and "stat_interval".

Signed-off-by: Peter W Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-15 16:39:35 -08:00
Paul Mundt
dd8632a12e NOMMU: Make mmap allocation page trimming behaviour configurable.
NOMMU mmap allocates a piece of memory for an mmap that's rounded up in size to
the nearest power-of-2 number of pages.  Currently it then discards the excess
pages back to the page allocator, making that memory available for use by other
things.  This can, however, cause greater amount of fragmentation.

To counter this, a sysctl is added in order to fine-tune the trimming
behaviour.  The default behaviour remains to trim pages aggressively, while
this can either be disabled completely or set to a higher page-granular
watermark in order to have finer-grained control.

vm region vm_top bits taken from an earlier patch by David Howells.

Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com>
2009-01-08 12:04:47 +00:00
David Rientjes
2da02997e0 mm: add dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes sysctls
This change introduces two new sysctls to /proc/sys/vm:
dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes.

dirty_background_bytes is the counterpart to dirty_background_ratio and
dirty_bytes is the counterpart to dirty_ratio.

With growing memory capacities of individual machines, it's no longer
sufficient to specify dirty thresholds as a percentage of the amount of
dirtyable memory over the entire system.

dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes specify quantities of memory, in
bytes, that represent the dirty limits for the entire system.  If either
of these values is set, its value represents the amount of dirty memory
that is needed to commence either background or direct writeback.

When a `bytes' or `ratio' file is written, its counterpart becomes a
function of the written value.  For example, if dirty_bytes is written to
be 8096, 8K of memory is required to commence direct writeback.
dirty_ratio is then functionally equivalent to 8K / the amount of
dirtyable memory:

	dirtyable_memory = free pages + mapped pages + file cache

	dirty_background_bytes = dirty_background_ratio * dirtyable_memory
		-or-
	dirty_background_ratio = dirty_background_bytes / dirtyable_memory

		AND

	dirty_bytes = dirty_ratio * dirtyable_memory
		-or-
	dirty_ratio = dirty_bytes / dirtyable_memory

Only one of dirty_background_bytes and dirty_background_ratio may be
specified at a time, and only one of dirty_bytes and dirty_ratio may be
specified.  When one sysctl is written, the other appears as 0 when read.

The `bytes' files operate on a page size granularity since dirty limits
are compared with ZVC values, which are in page units.

Prior to this change, the minimum dirty_ratio was 5 as implemented by
get_dirty_limits() although /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio would show any user
written value between 0 and 100.  This restriction is maintained, but
dirty_bytes has a lower limit of only one page.

Also prior to this change, the dirty_background_ratio could not equal or
exceed dirty_ratio.  This restriction is maintained in addition to
restricting dirty_background_bytes.  If either background threshold equals
or exceeds that of the dirty threshold, it is implicitly set to half the
dirty threshold.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-06 15:59:03 -08:00
Greg Kroah-Hartman
bb20698d46 Document kernel taint flags properly
This fills in the documentation for all of the current kernel taint
flags, and fixes the number for TAINT_CRAP, which was incorrectly
described.

Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2008-10-29 15:03:49 -07:00
Greg Kroah-Hartman
061b1bd394 Staging: add TAINT_CRAP for all drivers/staging code
We need to add a flag for all code that is in the drivers/staging/
directory to prevent all other kernel developers from worrying about
issues here, and to notify users that the drivers might not be as good
as they are normally used to.

Based on code from Andreas Gruenbacher and Jeff Mahoney to provide a
TAINT flag for the support level of a kernel module in the Novell
enterprise kernel release.

This is the kernel portion of this feature, the ability for the flag to
be set needs to be done in the build process and will happen in a
follow-up patch.

Cc: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
Cc: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2008-10-10 15:31:05 -07:00
Andrew Morton
b4d19cc84e Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt: fix softlockup_thresh description
- s/s/seconds/

- s/10 seconds/60 seconds/

- Mention the zero-disables-it feature.

Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-09-23 08:09:14 -07:00
Matt LaPlante
d91958815d Documentation cleanup: trivial misspelling, punctuation, and grammar corrections.
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-07-26 12:00:06 -07:00
Michael Opdenacker
ac76cff2ec Documentation: sysctl/kernel.txt: fix documentation reference
This patch fixes a reference to Documentation/kmod.txt
which was apparently renamed to Documentation/debugging-modules.txt

Signed-off-by: Michael Opdenacker <michael@free-electrons.com>
Cc: "Randy.Dunlap" <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-02-13 16:21:20 -08:00
Jiri Kosina
1ec7fd50ba brk: document randomize_va_space and CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK (was Re:
Document randomize_va_space and CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK.

Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
2008-02-09 23:24:08 +01:00
David Rientjes
fef1bdd68c oom: add sysctl to enable task memory dump
Adds a new sysctl, 'oom_dump_tasks', that enables the kernel to produce a
dump of all system tasks (excluding kernel threads) when performing an
OOM-killing.  Information includes pid, uid, tgid, vm size, rss, cpu,
oom_adj score, and name.

This is helpful for determining why there was an OOM condition and which
rogue task caused it.

It is configurable so that large systems, such as those with several
thousand tasks, do not incur a performance penalty associated with dumping
data they may not desire.

If an OOM was triggered as a result of a memory controller, the tasklist
shall be filtered to exclude tasks that are not a member of the same
cgroup.

Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-02-07 08:42:19 -08:00
Eric Dumazet
9cfe015aa4 get rid of NR_OPEN and introduce a sysctl_nr_open
NR_OPEN (historically set to 1024*1024) actually forbids processes to open
more than 1024*1024 handles.

Unfortunatly some production servers hit the not so 'ridiculously high
value' of 1024*1024 file descriptors per process.

Changing NR_OPEN is not considered safe because of vmalloc space potential
exhaust.

This patch introduces a new sysctl (/proc/sys/fs/nr_open) wich defaults to
1024*1024, so that admins can decide to change this limit if their workload
needs it.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: export it for sparc64]
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-02-06 10:41:06 -08:00
Bron Gondwana
195cf453d2 mm/page-writeback: highmem_is_dirtyable option
Add vm.highmem_is_dirtyable toggle

A 32 bit machine with HIGHMEM64 enabled running DCC has an MMAPed file of
approximately 2Gb size which contains a hash format that is written
randomly by the dbclean process.  On 2.6.16 this process took a few
minutes.  With lowmem only accounting of dirty ratios, this takes about 12
hours of 100% disk IO, all random writes.

Include a toggle in /proc/sys/vm/highmem_is_dirtyable which can be set to 1 to
add the highmem back to the total available memory count.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Fix the CONFIG_DETECT_SOFTLOCKUP=y build]
Signed-off-by: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Cc: Ethan Solomita <solo@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: WU Fengguang <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-02-05 09:44:18 -08:00
Nishanth Aravamudan
d5dbac87b4 Documentation: update hugetlb information
The hugetlb documentation has gotten a bit out of sync with the current code.
Updated the sysctl file to refer to Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt.  Update
that file to contain the current state of affairs (with the newer named sysctl
in place).

Signed-off-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Adam Litke <agl@us.ibm.com>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-12-17 19:28:17 -08:00
Pavel Machek
24950898ff vm.txt: document min_free_pages as critical for correctness
min_free_pages is critical for correctness, document it as such.

Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-10-17 08:43:06 -07:00
Jesper Juhl
ea069f46fc Add a 00-INDEX file to Documentation/sysctl/
Add a 00-INDEX file to Documentation/sysctl/

Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-10-17 08:43:05 -07:00
Ravikiran G Thirumalai
c4f3b63fe1 softlockup: add a /proc tuning parameter
Control the trigger limit for softlockup warnings.  This is useful for
debugging softlockups, by lowering the softlockup_thresh to identify
possible softlockups earlier.

This patch:
1. Adds a sysctl softlockup_thresh with valid values of 1-60s
   (Higher value to disable false positives)
2. Changes the softlockup printk to print the cpu softlockup time

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Fix various warnings and add definition of "two"]
Signed-off-by: Ravikiran Thirumalai <kiran@scalex86.org>
Signed-off-by: Shai Fultheim <shai@scalex86.org>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-10-17 08:42:47 -07:00
David Rientjes
fe071d7e8a oom: add oom_kill_allocating_task sysctl
Adds a new sysctl, 'oom_kill_allocating_task', which will automatically kill
the OOM-triggering task instead of scanning through the tasklist to find a
memory-hogging target.  This is helpful for systems with an insanely large
number of tasks where scanning the tasklist significantly degrades
performance.

Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-10-17 08:42:46 -07:00
Mel Gorman
ed7ed36517 handle kernelcore=: generic
This patch adds the kernelcore= parameter for x86.

Once all patches are applied, a new command-line parameter exist and a new
sysctl.  This patch adds the necessary documentation.

From: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com>

  When "kernelcore" boot option is specified, kernel can't boot up on ia64
  because of an infinite loop.  In addition, the parsing code can be handled
  in an architecture-independent manner.

  This patch uses common code to handle the kernelcore= parameter.  It is
  only available to architectures that support arch-independent zone-sizing
  (i.e.  define CONFIG_ARCH_POPULATES_NODE_MAP).  Other architectures will
  ignore the boot parameter.

[bunk@stusta.de: make cmdline_parse_kernelcore() static]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-07-17 10:22:59 -07:00
Andrew Morton
97d8f83cb7 Add Documentation/sysctl/ctl_unnumbered.txt
Poeple keep on adding new numbered sysctls, when they're supposed not to.

Add a documentation file which explain why new sysctls should use
CTL_UNNUMBERED.  The next patch will sprinkle pointers to this throughout
sysctl.c.

Eric provided the text (thanks)

Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-07-16 09:05:49 -07:00
KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
f0c0b2b808 change zonelist order: zonelist order selection logic
Make zonelist creation policy selectable from sysctl/boot option v6.

This patch makes NUMA's zonelist (of pgdat) order selectable.
Available order are Default(automatic)/ Node-based / Zone-based.

[Default Order]
The kernel selects Node-based or Zone-based order automatically.

[Node-based Order]
This policy treats the locality of memory as the most important parameter.
Zonelist order is created by each zone's locality. This means lower zones
(ex. ZONE_DMA) can be used before higher zone (ex. ZONE_NORMAL) exhausion.
IOW. ZONE_DMA will be in the middle of zonelist.
current 2.6.21 kernel uses this.

Pros.
 * A user can expect local memory as much as possible.
Cons.
 * lower zone will be exhansted before higher zone. This may cause OOM_KILL.

Maybe suitable if ZONE_DMA is relatively big and you never see OOM_KILL
because of ZONE_DMA exhaution and you need the best locality.

(example)
assume 2 node NUMA. node(0) has ZONE_DMA/ZONE_NORMAL, node(1) has ZONE_NORMAL.

*node(0)'s memory allocation order:

 node(0)'s NORMAL -> node(0)'s DMA -> node(1)'s NORMAL.

*node(1)'s memory allocation order:

 node(1)'s NORMAL -> node(0)'s NORMAL -> node(0)'s DMA.

[Zone-based order]
This policy treats the zone type as the most important parameter.
Zonelist order is created by zone-type order. This means lower zone
never be used bofere higher zone exhaustion.
IOW. ZONE_DMA will be always at the tail of zonelist.

Pros.
 * OOM_KILL(bacause of lower zone) occurs only if the whole zones are exhausted.
Cons.
 * memory locality may not be best.

(example)
assume 2 node NUMA. node(0) has ZONE_DMA/ZONE_NORMAL, node(1) has ZONE_NORMAL.

*node(0)'s memory allocation order:

 node(0)'s NORMAL -> node(1)'s NORMAL -> node(0)'s DMA.

*node(1)'s memory allocation order:

 node(1)'s NORMAL -> node(0)'s NORMAL -> node(0)'s DMA.

bootoption "numa_zonelist_order=" and proc/sysctl is supporetd.

command:
%echo N > /proc/sys/vm/numa_zonelist_order

Will rebuild zonelist in Node-based order.

command:
%echo Z > /proc/sys/vm/numa_zonelist_order

Will rebuild zonelist in Zone-based order.

Thanks to Lee Schermerhorn, he gives me much help and codes.

[Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com: add check_highest_zone to build_zonelists_in_zone_order]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: build fix]
Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: "jesse.barnes@intel.com" <jesse.barnes@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-07-16 09:05:35 -07:00
Eric Paris
ed03218951 security: Protection for exploiting null dereference using mmap
Add a new security check on mmap operations to see if the user is attempting
to mmap to low area of the address space.  The amount of space protected is
indicated by the new proc tunable /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr and defaults to
0, preserving existing behavior.

This patch uses a new SELinux security class "memprotect."  Policy already
contains a number of allow rules like a_t self:process * (unconfined_t being
one of them) which mean that putting this check in the process class (its
best current fit) would make it useless as all user processes, which we also
want to protect against, would be allowed. By taking the memprotect name of
the new class it will also make it possible for us to move some of the other
memory protect permissions out of 'process' and into the new class next time
we bump the policy version number (which I also think is a good future idea)

Acked-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
2007-07-11 22:52:29 -04:00
Matt LaPlante
a982ac06b0 misc doc and kconfig typos
Fix various typos in kernel docs and Kconfigs, 2.6.21-rc4.

Signed-off-by: Matt LaPlante <kernel1@cyberdogtech.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
2007-05-09 08:58:15 +02:00
Robert P. J. Day
beb7dd86a1 Fix misspellings collected by members of KJ list.
Fix the misspellings of "propogate", "writting" and (oh, the shame
:-) "kenrel" in the source tree.

Signed-off-by: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@mindspring.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
2007-05-09 07:14:03 +02:00
Yasunori Goto
2b744c01a5 mm: fix handling of panic_on_oom when cpusets are in use
The current panic_on_oom may not work if there is a process using
cpusets/mempolicy, because other nodes' memory may remain.  But some people
want failover by panic ASAP even if they are used.  This patch makes new
setting for its request.

This is tested on my ia64 box which has 3 nodes.

Signed-off-by: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: Ethan Solomita <solo@google.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-07 12:12:55 -07:00
Chuck Ebbert
0741f4d207 [PATCH] x86: add sysctl for kstack_depth_to_print
Add sysctl for kstack_depth_to_print. This lets users change
the amount of raw stack data printed in dump_stack() without
having to reboot.

Signed-off-by: Chuck Ebbert <76306.1226@compuserve.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
2006-12-07 02:14:11 +01:00
Matt LaPlante
5d3f083d8f Fix typos in /Documentation : Misc
This patch fixes typos in various Documentation txts. The patch addresses some
misc words.

Signed-off-by: Matt LaPlante <kernel1@cyberdogtech.com>
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
2006-11-30 05:21:10 +01:00
Matthias Urlichs
cd0810410b [PATCH] document the core-dump-to-a-pipe patch
The pipe-a-coredump-to-a-program feature was undocumented.
*Grumble*.

NB: a good enhancement to that patch would be: save all the stuff that a
core file can get from the %x expansions in the environment.

Signed-off-by: Matthias Urlichs <matthias@urlichs.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-10-11 11:14:22 -07:00
Christoph Lameter
0ff38490c8 [PATCH] zone_reclaim: dynamic slab reclaim
Currently one can enable slab reclaim by setting an explicit option in
/proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode.  Slab reclaim is then used as a final
option if the freeing of unmapped file backed pages is not enough to free
enough pages to allow a local allocation.

However, that means that the slab can grow excessively and that most memory
of a node may be used by slabs.  We have had a case where a machine with
46GB of memory was using 40-42GB for slab.  Zone reclaim was effective in
dealing with pagecache pages.  However, slab reclaim was only done during
global reclaim (which is a bit rare on NUMA systems).

This patch implements slab reclaim during zone reclaim.  Zone reclaim
occurs if there is a danger of an off node allocation.  At that point we

1. Shrink the per node page cache if the number of pagecache
   pages is more than min_unmapped_ratio percent of pages in a zone.

2. Shrink the slab cache if the number of the nodes reclaimable slab pages
   (patch depends on earlier one that implements that counter)
   are more than min_slab_ratio (a new /proc/sys/vm tunable).

The shrinking of the slab cache is a bit problematic since it is not node
specific.  So we simply calculate what point in the slab we want to reach
(current per node slab use minus the number of pages that neeed to be
allocated) and then repeately run the global reclaim until that is
unsuccessful or we have reached the limit.  I hope we will have zone based
slab reclaim at some point which will make that easier.

The default for the min_slab_ratio is 5%

Also remove the slab option from /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode.

[akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-26 08:48:51 -07:00