mm: add overcommit_kbytes sysctl variable
Some applications that run on HPC clusters are designed around the
availability of RAM and the overcommit ratio is fine tuned to get the
maximum usage of memory without swapping. With growing memory, the
1%-of-all-RAM grain provided by overcommit_ratio has become too coarse
for these workload (on a 2TB machine it represents no less than 20GB).
This patch adds the new overcommit_kbytes sysctl variable that allow a
much finer grain.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix nommu build]
Signed-off-by: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
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>
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
index 8eaa2fc..cbfaaa6 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
+++ b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
@@ -14,8 +14,8 @@
2 - Don't overcommit. The total address space commit
for the system is not permitted to exceed swap + a
- configurable percentage (default is 50) of physical RAM.
- Depending on the percentage you use, in most situations
+ configurable amount (default is 50%) of physical RAM.
+ Depending on the amount you use, in most situations
this means a process will not be killed while accessing
pages but will receive errors on memory allocation as
appropriate.
@@ -26,7 +26,8 @@
The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl `vm.overcommit_memory'.
-The overcommit percentage is set via `vm.overcommit_ratio'.
+The overcommit amount can be set via `vm.overcommit_ratio' (percentage)
+or `vm.overcommit_kbytes' (absolute value).
The current overcommit limit and amount committed are viewable in
/proc/meminfo as CommitLimit and Committed_AS respectively.