linux/Documentation/sysctl
Matthias Tafelmeier 3d48b53fb2 net: dev_weight: TX/RX orthogonality
Oftenly, introducing side effects on packet processing on the other half
of the stack by adjusting one of TX/RX via sysctl is not desirable.
There are cases of demand for asymmetric, orthogonal configurability.

This holds true especially for nodes where RPS for RFS usage on top is
configured and therefore use the 'old dev_weight'. This is quite a
common base configuration setup nowadays, even with NICs of superior processing
support (e.g. aRFS).

A good example use case are nodes acting as noSQL data bases with a
large number of tiny requests and rather fewer but large packets as responses.
It's affordable to have large budget and rx dev_weights for the
requests. But as a side effect having this large a number on TX
processed in one run can overwhelm drivers.

This patch therefore introduces an independent configurability via sysctl to
userland.

Signed-off-by: Matthias Tafelmeier <matthias.tafelmeier@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
2016-12-29 15:38:35 -05:00
..
00-INDEX sysctl: remove obsolete comments 2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
abi.txt
fs.txt mnt: Add a per mount namespace limit on the number of mounts 2016-09-30 12:46:48 -05:00
kernel.txt These are the documentation changes for 4.10. 2016-12-12 21:58:13 -08:00
net.txt net: dev_weight: TX/RX orthogonality 2016-12-29 15:38:35 -05:00
README userns; Document per user per user namespace limits. 2016-09-22 12:52:03 -05:00
sunrpc.txt
user.txt userns; Document per user per user namespace limits. 2016-09-22 12:52:03 -05:00
vm.txt Documentation: add watermark_scale_factor to the list of vm systcl file 2016-07-18 08:27:01 -06:00

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
user/		Per user per user namespace limits

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 :-)