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2009-01-15Update of Documentation: vm.txt and proc.txtPeter W Morreale
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>
2009-01-08NOMMU: Make mmap allocation page trimming behaviour configurable.Paul Mundt
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>
2009-01-06mm: add dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes sysctlsDavid Rientjes
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>
2008-07-26Documentation cleanup: trivial misspelling, punctuation, and grammar ↵Matt LaPlante
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>
2008-02-07oom: add sysctl to enable task memory dumpDavid Rientjes
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>
2008-02-05mm/page-writeback: highmem_is_dirtyable optionBron Gondwana
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>
2007-12-17Documentation: update hugetlb informationNishanth Aravamudan
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>
2007-10-17vm.txt: document min_free_pages as critical for correctnessPavel Machek
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>
2007-10-17oom: add oom_kill_allocating_task sysctlDavid Rientjes
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>
2007-07-17handle kernelcore=: genericMel Gorman
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>
2007-07-16change zonelist order: zonelist order selection logicKAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
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>
2007-07-11security: Protection for exploiting null dereference using mmapEric Paris
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>
2007-05-07mm: fix handling of panic_on_oom when cpusets are in useYasunori Goto
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>
2006-11-30Fix typos in /Documentation : MiscMatt LaPlante
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>
2006-09-26[PATCH] zone_reclaim: dynamic slab reclaimChristoph Lameter
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>
2006-07-03[PATCH] ZVC/zone_reclaim: Leave 1% of unmapped pagecache pages for file I/OChristoph Lameter
It turns out that it is advantageous to leave a small portion of unmapped file backed pages if all of a zone's pages (or almost all pages) are allocated and so the page allocator has to go off-node. This allows recently used file I/O buffers to stay on the node and reduces the times that zone reclaim is invoked if file I/O occurs when we run out of memory in a zone. The problem is that zone reclaim runs too frequently when the page cache is used for file I/O (read write and therefore unmapped pages!) alone and we have almost all pages of the zone allocated. Zone reclaim may remove 32 unmapped pages. File I/O will use these pages for the next read/write requests and the unmapped pages increase. After the zone has filled up again zone reclaim will remove it again after only 32 pages. This cycle is too inefficient and there are potentially too many zone reclaim cycles. With the 1% boundary we may still remove all unmapped pages for file I/O in zone reclaim pass. However. it will take a large number of read and writes to get back to 1% again where we trigger zone reclaim again. The zone reclaim 2.6.16/17 does not show this behavior because we have a 30 second timeout. [akpm@osdl.org: rename the /proc file and the variable] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-06-30[PATCH] zoned vm counters: zone_reclaim: remove ↵Christoph Lameter
/proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_interval The zone_reclaim_interval was necessary because we were not able to determine how many unmapped pages exist in a zone. Therefore we had to scan in intervals to figure out if any pages were unmapped. With the zoned counters and NR_ANON_PAGES we now know the number of pagecache pages and the number of mapped pages in a zone. So we can simply skip the reclaim if there is an insufficient number of unmapped pages. We use SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX as the boundary. Drop all support for /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_interval. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-06-23[PATCH] support for panic at OOMKAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
This patch adds panic_on_oom sysctl under sys.vm. When sysctl vm.panic_on_oom = 1, the kernel panics intead of killing rogue processes. And if vm.panic_on_oom is 0 the kernel will do oom_kill() in the same way as it does today. Of course, the default value is 0 and only root can modifies it. In general, oom_killer works well and kill rogue processes. So the whole system can survive. But there are environments where panic is preferable rather than kill some processes. Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-02-01[PATCH] Reclaim slab during zone reclaimChristoph Lameter
If large amounts of zone memory are used by empty slabs then zone_reclaim becomes uneffective. This patch shakes the slab a bit. The problem with this patch is that the slab reclaim is not containable to a zone. Thus slab reclaim may affect the whole system and be extremely slow. This also means that we cannot determine how many pages were freed in this zone. Thus we need to go off node for at least one allocation. The functionality is disabled by default. We could modify the shrinkers to take a zone parameter but that would be quite invasive. Better ideas are welcome. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-02-01[PATCH] Zone reclaim: Allow modification of zone reclaim behaviorChristoph Lameter
In some situations one may want zone_reclaim to behave differently. For example a process writing large amounts of memory will spew unto other nodes to cache the writes if many pages in a zone become dirty. This may impact the performance of processes running on other nodes. Allowing writes during reclaim puts a stop to that behavior and throttles the process by restricting the pages to the local zone. Similarly one may want to contain processes to local memory by enabling regular swap behavior during zone_reclaim. Off node memory allocation can then be controlled through memory policies and cpusets. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-02-01[PATCH] zone_reclaim: configurable off node allocation period.Christoph Lameter
Currently the zone_reclaim code has a fixed window of 30 seconds of off node allocations should a local zone have no unused pagecache pages left. Reclaim will be attempted again after this timeout period to avoid repeated useless scans for memory. This is also useful to established sufficiently large off node allocation chunks to relieve the local node. It may be beneficial to adjust that time period for some special situations. For example if memory use was exceeding node capacity one may want to give up for longer periods of time. If memory spikes intermittendly then one may want to shorten the time period to reduce the number of off node allocations. This patch allows just that.... Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-01-18[PATCH] Zone reclaim: proc overrideChristoph Lameter
proc support for zone reclaim This patch creates a proc entry /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode that may be used to override the automatic determination of the zone reclaim made on bootup. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-01-08[PATCH] Make high and batch sizes of per_cpu_pagelists configurableRohit Seth
As recently there has been lot of traffic on the right values for batch and high water marks for per_cpu_pagelists. This patch makes these two variables configurable through /proc interface. A new tunable /proc/sys/vm/percpu_pagelist_fraction is added. This entry controls the fraction of pages at most in each zone that are allocated for each per cpu page list. The min value for this is 8. It means that we don't allow more than 1/8th of pages in each zone to be allocated in any single per_cpu_pagelist. The batch value of each per cpu pagelist is also updated as a result. It is set to pcp->high/4. The upper limit of batch is (PAGE_SHIFT * 8) Signed-off-by: Rohit Seth <rohit.seth@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-01-08[PATCH] drop-pagecacheAndrew Morton
Add /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. When written to, this will cause the kernel to discard as much pagecache and/or reclaimable slab objects as it can. THis operation requires root permissions. It won't drop dirty data, so the user should run `sync' first. Caveats: a) Holds inode_lock for exorbitant amounts of time. b) Needs to be taught about NUMA nodes: propagate these all the way through so the discarding can be controlled on a per-node basis. This is a debugging feature: useful for getting consistent results between filesystem benchmarks. We could possibly put it under a config option, but it's less than 300 bytes. Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-04-16Linux-2.6.12-rc2Linus Torvalds
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip!