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Provide /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force an immediate update of per-cpu into global vmstats: useful to avoid a sleep(2) or whatever before checking counts when testing. Originally added to work around a bug which left counts stranded indefinitely on a cpu going idle (an inaccuracy magnified when small below-batch numbers represent "huge" amounts of memory), but I believe that bug is now fixed: nonetheless, this is still a useful knob. Its schedule_on_each_cpu() is probably too expensive just to fold into reading /proc/meminfo itself: give this mode 0600 to prevent abuse. Allow a write or a read to do the same: nothing to read, but "grep -h Shmem /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh /proc/meminfo" is convenient. Oh, and since global_page_state() itself is careful to disguise any underflow as 0, hack in an "Invalid argument" and pr_warn() if a counter is negative after the refresh - this helped to fix a misaccounting of NR_ISOLATED_FILE in my migration code. But on recent kernels, I find that NR_ALLOC_BATCH and NR_PAGES_SCANNED often go negative some of the time. I have not yet worked out why, but have no evidence that it's actually harmful. Punt for the moment by just ignoring the anomaly on those. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com> Cc: Yang Shi <yang.shi@linaro.org> Cc: Ning Qu <quning@gmail.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com> Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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| README | ||
| sunrpc.txt | ||
| vm.txt | ||
Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> 'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in the source...' Well, this documentation is written because some people either don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't have the time or knowledge to read the source code. Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-) ============================================================== Legal blurb: As usual, there are two main things to consider: 1. you get what you pay for 2. it's free The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you... But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that you're the last RTFMing person to screw up. In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org> Rik van Riel. ============================================================== Introduction: Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you don't even need special tools to do it! In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config facilities: - a running Linux system - root access - common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days) - knowledge of what all those values mean As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'. The subdirs are about: abi/ execution domains & personalities debug/ <empty> dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info) fs/ specific filesystems filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning binfmt_misc <Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt> kernel/ global kernel info / tuning miscellaneous stuff net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in: <Documentation/networking/> proc/ <empty> sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS) vm/ memory management tuning buffer and cache management These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd really like to hear about it :-)