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+Documentation for /proc/sys/vm/* kernel version 2.6.29
+ (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>
+ (c) 2008 Peter W. Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
+
+For general info and legal blurb, please look in README.
+
+==============================================================
+
+This file contains the documentation for the sysctl files in
+/proc/sys/vm and is valid for Linux kernel version 2.6.29.
+
+The files in this directory can be used to tune the operation
+of the virtual memory (VM) subsystem of the Linux kernel and
+the writeout of dirty data to disk.
+
+Default values and initialization routines for most of these
+files can be found in mm/swap.c.
+
+Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
+
+- block_dump
+- compact_memory
+- dirty_background_bytes
+- dirty_background_ratio
+- dirty_bytes
+- dirty_expire_centisecs
+- dirty_ratio
+- dirty_writeback_centisecs
+- drop_caches
+- extfrag_threshold
+- hugepages_treat_as_movable
+- hugetlb_shm_group
+- laptop_mode
+- legacy_va_layout
+- lowmem_reserve_ratio
+- max_map_count
+- memory_failure_early_kill
+- memory_failure_recovery
+- min_free_kbytes
+- min_slab_ratio
+- min_unmapped_ratio
+- mmap_min_addr
+- nr_hugepages
+- nr_overcommit_hugepages
+- nr_trim_pages (only if CONFIG_MMU=n)
+- numa_zonelist_order
+- oom_dump_tasks
+- oom_kill_allocating_task
+- overcommit_memory
+- overcommit_ratio
+- page-cluster
+- panic_on_oom
+- percpu_pagelist_fraction
+- stat_interval
+- swappiness
+- vfs_cache_pressure
+- zone_reclaim_mode
+
+==============================================================
+
+block_dump
+
+block_dump enables block I/O debugging when set to a nonzero value. More
+information on block I/O debugging is in Documentation/laptops/laptop-mode.txt.
+
+==============================================================
+
+compact_memory
+
+Available only when CONFIG_COMPACTION is set. When 1 is written to the file,
+all zones are compacted such that free memory is available in contiguous
+blocks where possible. This can be important for example in the allocation of
+huge pages although processes will also directly compact memory as required.
+
+==============================================================
+
+dirty_background_bytes
+
+Contains the amount of dirty memory at which the background kernel
+flusher threads will start writeback.
+
+Note: dirty_background_bytes is the counterpart of dirty_background_ratio. Only
+one of them may be specified at a time. When one sysctl is written it is
+immediately taken into account to evaluate the dirty memory limits and the
+other appears as 0 when read.
+
+==============================================================
+
+dirty_background_ratio
+
+Contains, as a percentage of total system memory, the number of pages at which
+the background kernel flusher threads will start writing out dirty data.
+
+==============================================================
+
+dirty_bytes
+
+Contains the amount of dirty memory at which a process generating disk writes
+will itself start writeback.
+
+Note: dirty_bytes is the counterpart of dirty_ratio. Only one of them may be
+specified at a time. When one sysctl is written it is immediately taken into
+account to evaluate the dirty memory limits and the other appears as 0 when
+read.
+
+Note: the minimum value allowed for dirty_bytes is two pages (in bytes); any
+value lower than this limit will be ignored and the old configuration will be
+retained.
+
+==============================================================
+
+dirty_expire_centisecs
+
+This tunable is used to define when dirty data is old enough to be eligible
+for writeout by the kernel flusher threads. It is expressed in 100'ths
+of a second. Data which has been dirty in-memory for longer than this
+interval will be written out next time a flusher thread wakes up.
+
+==============================================================
+
+dirty_ratio
+
+Contains, as a percentage of total system memory, the number of pages at which
+a process which is generating disk writes will itself start writing out dirty
+data.
+
+==============================================================
+
+dirty_writeback_centisecs
+
+The kernel flusher threads will periodically wake up and write `old' data
+out to disk. This tunable expresses the interval between those wakeups, in
+100'ths of a second.
+
+Setting this to zero disables periodic writeback altogether.
+
+==============================================================
+
+drop_caches
+
+Writing to this will cause the kernel to drop clean caches, dentries and
+inodes from memory, causing that memory to become free.
+
+To free pagecache:
+ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
+To free dentries and inodes:
+ echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
+To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:
+ echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
+
+As this is a non-destructive operation and dirty objects are not freeable, the
+user should run `sync' first.
+
+==============================================================
+
+extfrag_threshold
+
+This parameter affects whether the kernel will compact memory or direct
+reclaim to satisfy a high-order allocation. /proc/extfrag_index shows what
+the fragmentation index for each order is in each zone in the system. Values
+tending towards 0 imply allocations would fail due to lack of memory,
+values towards 1000 imply failures are due to fragmentation and -1 implies
+that the allocation will succeed as long as watermarks are met.
+
+The kernel will not compact memory in a zone if the
+fragmentation index is <= extfrag_threshold. The default value is 500.
+
+==============================================================
+
+hugepages_treat_as_movable
+
+This parameter is only useful when kernelcore= is specified at boot time to
+create ZONE_MOVABLE for pages that may be reclaimed or migrated. Huge pages
+are not movable so are not normally allocated from ZONE_MOVABLE. A non-zero
+value written to hugepages_treat_as_movable allows huge pages to be allocated
+from ZONE_MOVABLE.
+
+Once enabled, the ZONE_MOVABLE is treated as an area of memory the huge
+pages pool can easily grow or shrink within. Assuming that applications are
+not running that mlock() a lot of memory, it is likely the huge pages pool
+can grow to the size of ZONE_MOVABLE by repeatedly entering the desired value
+into nr_hugepages and triggering page reclaim.
+
+==============================================================
+
+hugetlb_shm_group
+
+hugetlb_shm_group contains group id that is allowed to create SysV
+shared memory segment using hugetlb page.
+
+==============================================================
+
+laptop_mode
+
+laptop_mode is a knob that controls "laptop mode". All the things that are
+controlled by this knob are discussed in Documentation/laptops/laptop-mode.txt.
+
+==============================================================
+
+legacy_va_layout
+
+If non-zero, this sysctl disables the new 32-bit mmap layout - the kernel
+will use the legacy (2.4) layout for all processes.
+
+==============================================================
+
+lowmem_reserve_ratio
+
+For some specialised workloads on highmem machines it is dangerous for
+the kernel to allow process memory to be allocated from the "lowmem"
+zone. This is because that memory could then be pinned via the mlock()
+system call, or by unavailability of swapspace.
+
+And on large highmem machines this lack of reclaimable lowmem memory
+can be fatal.
+
+So the Linux page allocator has a mechanism which prevents allocations
+which _could_ use highmem from using too much lowmem. This means that
+a certain amount of lowmem is defended from the possibility of being
+captured into pinned user memory.
+
+(The same argument applies to the old 16 megabyte ISA DMA region. This
+mechanism will also defend that region from allocations which could use
+highmem or lowmem).
+
+The `lowmem_reserve_ratio' tunable determines how aggressive the kernel is
+in defending these lower zones.
+
+If you have a machine which uses highmem or ISA DMA and your
+applications are using mlock(), or if you are running with no swap then
+you probably should change the lowmem_reserve_ratio setting.
+
+The lowmem_reserve_ratio is an array. You can see them by reading this file.
+-
+% cat /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio
+256 256 32
+-
+Note: # of this elements is one fewer than number of zones. Because the highest
+ zone's value is not necessary for following calculation.
+
+But, these values are not used directly. The kernel calculates # of protection
+pages for each zones from them. These are shown as array of protection pages
+in /proc/zoneinfo like followings. (This is an example of x86-64 box).
+Each zone has an array of protection pages like this.
+
+-
+Node 0, zone DMA
+ pages free 1355
+ min 3
+ low 3
+ high 4
+ :
+ :
+ numa_other 0
+ protection: (0, 2004, 2004, 2004)
+ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+ pagesets
+ cpu: 0 pcp: 0
+ :
+-
+These protections are added to score to judge whether this zone should be used
+for page allocation or should be reclaimed.
+
+In this example, if normal pages (index=2) are required to this DMA zone and
+watermark[WMARK_HIGH] is used for watermark, the kernel judges this zone should
+not be used because pages_free(1355) is smaller than watermark + protection[2]
+(4 + 2004 = 2008). If this protection value is 0, this zone would be used for
+normal page requirement. If requirement is DMA zone(index=0), protection[0]
+(=0) is used.
+
+zone[i]'s protection[j] is calculated by following expression.
+
+(i < j):
+ zone[i]->protection[j]
+ = (total sums of present_pages from zone[i+1] to zone[j] on the node)
+ / lowmem_reserve_ratio[i];
+(i = j):
+ (should not be protected. = 0;
+(i > j):
+ (not necessary, but looks 0)
+
+The default values of lowmem_reserve_ratio[i] are
+ 256 (if zone[i] means DMA or DMA32 zone)
+ 32 (others).
+As above expression, they are reciprocal number of ratio.
+256 means 1/256. # of protection pages becomes about "0.39%" of total present
+pages of higher zones on the node.
+
+If you would like to protect more pages, smaller values are effective.
+The minimum value is 1 (1/1 -> 100%).
+
+==============================================================
+
+max_map_count:
+
+This file contains the maximum number of memory map areas a process
+may have. Memory map areas are used as a side-effect of calling
+malloc, directly by mmap and mprotect, and also when loading shared
+libraries.
+
+While most applications need less than a thousand maps, certain
+programs, particularly malloc debuggers, may consume lots of them,
+e.g., up to one or two maps per allocation.
+
+The default value is 65536.
+
+=============================================================
+
+memory_failure_early_kill:
+
+Control how to kill processes when uncorrected memory error (typically
+a 2bit error in a memory module) is detected in the background by hardware
+that cannot be handled by the kernel. In some cases (like the page
+still having a valid copy on disk) the kernel will handle the failure
+transparently without affecting any applications. But if there is
+no other uptodate copy of the data it will kill to prevent any data
+corruptions from propagating.
+
+1: Kill all processes that have the corrupted and not reloadable page mapped
+as soon as the corruption is detected. Note this is not supported
+for a few types of pages, like kernel internally allocated data or
+the swap cache, but works for the majority of user pages.
+
+0: Only unmap the corrupted page from all processes and only kill a process
+who tries to access it.
+
+The kill is done using a catchable SIGBUS with BUS_MCEERR_AO, so processes can
+handle this if they want to.
+
+This is only active on architectures/platforms with advanced machine
+check handling and depends on the hardware capabilities.
+
+Applications can override this setting individually with the PR_MCE_KILL prctl
+
+==============================================================
+
+memory_failure_recovery
+
+Enable memory failure recovery (when supported by the platform)
+
+1: Attempt recovery.
+
+0: Always panic on a memory failure.
+
+==============================================================
+
+min_free_kbytes:
+
+This is used to force the Linux VM to keep a minimum number
+of kilobytes free. The VM uses this number to compute a
+watermark[WMARK_MIN] value for each lowmem zone in the system.
+Each lowmem zone gets a number of reserved free pages based
+proportionally on its size.
+
+Some minimal amount of memory is needed to satisfy PF_MEMALLOC
+allocations; if you set this to lower than 1024KB, your system will
+become subtly broken, and prone to deadlock under high loads.
+
+Setting this too high will OOM your machine instantly.
+
+=============================================================
+
+min_slab_ratio:
+
+This is available only on NUMA kernels.
+
+A percentage of the total pages in each zone. On Zone reclaim
+(fallback from the local zone occurs) slabs will be reclaimed if more
+than this percentage of pages in a zone are reclaimable slab pages.
+This insures that the slab growth stays under control even in NUMA
+systems that rarely perform global reclaim.
+
+The default is 5 percent.
+
+Note that slab reclaim is triggered in a per zone / node fashion.
+The process of reclaiming slab memory is currently not node specific
+and may not be fast.
+
+=============================================================
+
+min_unmapped_ratio:
+
+This is available only on NUMA kernels.
+
+This is a percentage of the total pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will
+only occur if more than this percentage of pages are in a state that
+zone_reclaim_mode allows to be reclaimed.
+
+If zone_reclaim_mode has the value 4 OR'd, then the percentage is compared
+against all file-backed unmapped pages including swapcache pages and tmpfs
+files. Otherwise, only unmapped pages backed by normal files but not tmpfs
+files and similar are considered.
+
+The default is 1 percent.
+
+==============================================================
+
+mmap_min_addr
+
+This file indicates the amount of address space which a user process will
+be restricted from mmapping. Since kernel null dereference bugs could
+accidentally operate based on the information in the first couple of pages
+of memory userspace processes should not be allowed to write to them. By
+default this value is set to 0 and no protections will be enforced by the
+security module. Setting this value to something like 64k will allow the
+vast majority of applications to work correctly and provide defense in depth
+against future potential kernel bugs.
+
+==============================================================
+
+nr_hugepages
+
+Change the minimum size of the hugepage pool.
+
+See Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt
+
+==============================================================
+
+nr_overcommit_hugepages
+
+Change the maximum size of the hugepage pool. The maximum is
+nr_hugepages + nr_overcommit_hugepages.
+
+See Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt
+
+==============================================================
+
+nr_trim_pages
+
+This is available only on NOMMU kernels.
+
+This value adjusts the excess page trimming behaviour of power-of-2 aligned
+NOMMU mmap allocations.
+
+A value of 0 disables trimming of allocations entirely, while a value of 1
+trims excess pages aggressively. Any value >= 1 acts as the watermark where
+trimming of allocations is initiated.
+
+The default value is 1.
+
+See Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt for more information.
+
+==============================================================
+
+numa_zonelist_order
+
+This sysctl is only for NUMA.
+'where the memory is allocated from' is controlled by zonelists.
+(This documentation ignores ZONE_HIGHMEM/ZONE_DMA32 for simple explanation.
+ you may be able to read ZONE_DMA as ZONE_DMA32...)
+
+In non-NUMA case, a zonelist for GFP_KERNEL is ordered as following.
+ZONE_NORMAL -> ZONE_DMA
+This means that a memory allocation request for GFP_KERNEL will
+get memory from ZONE_DMA only when ZONE_NORMAL is not available.
+
+In NUMA case, you can think of following 2 types of order.
+Assume 2 node NUMA and below is zonelist of Node(0)'s GFP_KERNEL
+
+(A) Node(0) ZONE_NORMAL -> Node(0) ZONE_DMA -> Node(1) ZONE_NORMAL
+(B) Node(0) ZONE_NORMAL -> Node(1) ZONE_NORMAL -> Node(0) ZONE_DMA.
+
+Type(A) offers the best locality for processes on Node(0), but ZONE_DMA
+will be used before ZONE_NORMAL exhaustion. This increases possibility of
+out-of-memory(OOM) of ZONE_DMA because ZONE_DMA is tend to be small.
+
+Type(B) cannot offer the best locality but is more robust against OOM of
+the DMA zone.
+
+Type(A) is called as "Node" order. Type (B) is "Zone" order.
+
+"Node order" orders the zonelists by node, then by zone within each node.
+Specify "[Nn]ode" for node order
+
+"Zone Order" orders the zonelists by zone type, then by node within each
+zone. Specify "[Zz]one" for zone order.
+
+Specify "[Dd]efault" to request automatic configuration. Autoconfiguration
+will select "node" order in following case.
+(1) if the DMA zone does not exist or
+(2) if the DMA zone comprises greater than 50% of the available memory or
+(3) if any node's DMA zone comprises greater than 60% of its local memory and
+ the amount of local memory is big enough.
+
+Otherwise, "zone" order will be selected. Default order is recommended unless
+this is causing problems for your system/application.
+
+==============================================================
+
+oom_dump_tasks
+
+Enables a system-wide task dump (excluding kernel threads) to be
+produced when the kernel performs an OOM-killing and includes such
+information as pid, uid, tgid, vm size, rss, nr_ptes, swapents,
+oom_score_adj score, and name. This is helpful to determine why the
+OOM killer was invoked, to identify the rogue task that caused it,
+and to determine why the OOM killer chose the task it did to kill.
+
+If this is set to zero, this information is suppressed. On very
+large systems with thousands of tasks it may not be feasible to dump
+the memory state information for each one. Such systems should not
+be forced to incur a performance penalty in OOM conditions when the
+information may not be desired.
+
+If this is set to non-zero, this information is shown whenever the
+OOM killer actually kills a memory-hogging task.
+
+The default value is 1 (enabled).
+
+==============================================================
+
+oom_kill_allocating_task
+
+This enables or disables killing the OOM-triggering task in
+out-of-memory situations.
+
+If this is set to zero, the OOM killer will scan through the entire
+tasklist and select a task based on heuristics to kill. This normally
+selects a rogue memory-hogging task that frees up a large amount of
+memory when killed.
+
+If this is set to non-zero, the OOM killer simply kills the task that
+triggered the out-of-memory condition. This avoids the expensive
+tasklist scan.
+
+If panic_on_oom is selected, it takes precedence over whatever value
+is used in oom_kill_allocating_task.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
+==============================================================
+
+overcommit_memory:
+
+This value contains a flag that enables memory overcommitment.
+
+When this flag is 0, the kernel attempts to estimate the amount
+of free memory left when userspace requests more memory.
+
+When this flag is 1, the kernel pretends there is always enough
+memory until it actually runs out.
+
+When this flag is 2, the kernel uses a "never overcommit"
+policy that attempts to prevent any overcommit of memory.
+
+This feature can be very useful because there are a lot of
+programs that malloc() huge amounts of memory "just-in-case"
+and don't use much of it.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
+See Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting and
+security/commoncap.c::cap_vm_enough_memory() for more information.
+
+==============================================================
+
+overcommit_ratio:
+
+When overcommit_memory is set to 2, the committed address
+space is not permitted to exceed swap plus this percentage
+of physical RAM. See above.
+
+==============================================================
+
+page-cluster
+
+page-cluster controls the number of pages up to which consecutive pages
+are read in from swap in a single attempt. This is the swap counterpart
+to page cache readahead.
+The mentioned consecutivity is not in terms of virtual/physical addresses,
+but consecutive on swap space - that means they were swapped out together.
+
+It is a logarithmic value - setting it to zero means "1 page", setting
+it to 1 means "2 pages", setting it to 2 means "4 pages", etc.
+Zero disables swap readahead completely.
+
+The default value is three (eight pages at a time). There may be some
+small benefits in tuning this to a different value if your workload is
+swap-intensive.
+
+Lower values mean lower latencies for initial faults, but at the same time
+extra faults and I/O delays for following faults if they would have been part of
+that consecutive pages readahead would have brought in.
+
+=============================================================
+
+panic_on_oom
+
+This enables or disables panic on out-of-memory feature.
+
+If this is set to 0, the kernel will kill some rogue process,
+called oom_killer. Usually, oom_killer can kill rogue processes and
+system will survive.
+
+If this is set to 1, the kernel panics when out-of-memory happens.
+However, if a process limits using nodes by mempolicy/cpusets,
+and those nodes become memory exhaustion status, one process
+may be killed by oom-killer. No panic occurs in this case.
+Because other nodes' memory may be free. This means system total status
+may be not fatal yet.
+
+If this is set to 2, the kernel panics compulsorily even on the
+above-mentioned. Even oom happens under memory cgroup, the whole
+system panics.
+
+The default value is 0.
+1 and 2 are for failover of clustering. Please select either
+according to your policy of failover.
+panic_on_oom=2+kdump gives you very strong tool to investigate
+why oom happens. You can get snapshot.
+
+=============================================================
+
+percpu_pagelist_fraction
+
+This is the fraction of pages at most (high mark pcp->high) 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. This entry only changes the value
+of hot per cpu pagelists. User can specify a number like 100 to allocate
+1/100th of each zone to each per cpu page list.
+
+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)
+
+The initial value is zero. Kernel does not use this value at boot time to set
+the high water marks for each per cpu page list.
+
+==============================================================
+
+stat_interval
+
+The time interval between which vm statistics are updated. The default
+is 1 second.
+
+==============================================================
+
+swappiness
+
+This control is used to define how aggressive the kernel will swap
+memory pages. Higher values will increase agressiveness, lower values
+decrease the amount of swap.
+
+The default value is 60.
+
+==============================================================
+
+vfs_cache_pressure
+------------------
+
+Controls the tendency of the kernel to reclaim the memory which is used for
+caching of directory and inode objects.
+
+At the default value of vfs_cache_pressure=100 the kernel will attempt to
+reclaim dentries and inodes at a "fair" rate with respect to pagecache and
+swapcache reclaim. Decreasing vfs_cache_pressure causes the kernel to prefer
+to retain dentry and inode caches. When vfs_cache_pressure=0, the kernel will
+never reclaim dentries and inodes due to memory pressure and this can easily
+lead to out-of-memory conditions. Increasing vfs_cache_pressure beyond 100
+causes the kernel to prefer to reclaim dentries and inodes.
+
+==============================================================
+
+zone_reclaim_mode:
+
+Zone_reclaim_mode allows someone to set more or less aggressive approaches to
+reclaim memory when a zone runs out of memory. If it is set to zero then no
+zone reclaim occurs. Allocations will be satisfied from other zones / nodes
+in the system.
+
+This is value ORed together of
+
+1 = Zone reclaim on
+2 = Zone reclaim writes dirty pages out
+4 = Zone reclaim swaps pages
+
+zone_reclaim_mode is set during bootup to 1 if it is determined that pages
+from remote zones will cause a measurable performance reduction. The
+page allocator will then reclaim easily reusable pages (those page
+cache pages that are currently not used) before allocating off node pages.
+
+It may be beneficial to switch off zone reclaim if the system is
+used for a file server and all of memory should be used for caching files
+from disk. In that case the caching effect is more important than
+data locality.
+
+Allowing zone reclaim to write out pages stops processes that are
+writing large amounts of data from dirtying pages on other nodes. Zone
+reclaim will write out dirty pages if a zone fills up and so effectively
+throttle the process. This may decrease the performance of a single process
+since it cannot use all of system memory to buffer the outgoing writes
+anymore but it preserve the memory on other nodes so that the performance
+of other processes running on other nodes will not be affected.
+
+Allowing regular swap effectively restricts allocations to the local
+node unless explicitly overridden by memory policies or cpuset
+configurations.
+
+============ End of Document =================================