linux/Documentation/sysctl
Michal Hocko c9bff3eebc mm, page_alloc: rip out ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE
Patch series "cleanup zonelists initialization", v1.

This is aimed at cleaning up the zonelists initialization code we have
but the primary motivation was bug report [2] which got resolved but the
usage of stop_machine is just too ugly to live.  Most patches are
straightforward but 3 of them need a special consideration.

Patch 1 removes zone ordered zonelists completely.  I am CCing linux-api
because this is a user visible change.  As I argue in the patch
description I do not think we have a strong usecase for it these days.
I have kept sysctl in place and warn into the log if somebody tries to
configure zone lists ordering.  If somebody has a real usecase for it we
can revert this patch but I do not expect anybody will actually notice
runtime differences.  This patch is not strictly needed for the rest but
it made patch 6 easier to implement.

Patch 7 removes stop_machine from build_all_zonelists without adding any
special synchronization between iterators and updater which I _believe_
is acceptable as explained in the changelog.  I hope I am not missing
anything.

Patch 8 then removes zonelists_mutex which is kind of ugly as well and
not really needed AFAICS but a care should be taken when double checking
my thinking.

This patch (of 9):

Supporting zone ordered zonelists costs us just a lot of code while the
usefulness is arguable if existent at all.  Mel has already made node
ordering default on 64b systems.  32b systems are still using
ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE because it is considered better to fallback to a
different NUMA node rather than consume precious lowmem zones.

This argument is, however, weaken by the fact that the memory reclaim
has been reworked to be node rather than zone oriented.  This means that
lowmem requests have to skip over all highmem pages on LRUs already and
so zone ordering doesn't save the reclaim time much.  So the only
advantage of the zone ordering is under a light memory pressure when
highmem requests do not ever hit into lowmem zones and the lowmem
pressure doesn't need to reclaim.

Considering that 32b NUMA systems are rather suboptimal already and it
is generally advisable to use 64b kernel on such a HW I believe we
should rather care about the code maintainability and just get rid of
ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE altogether.  Keep systcl in place and warn if
somebody tries to set zone ordering either from kernel command line or
the sysctl.

[mhocko@suse.com: reading vm.numa_zonelist_order will never terminate]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170721143915.14161-2-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Toshi Kani <toshi.kani@hpe.com>
Cc: Abdul Haleem <abdhalee@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2017-09-06 17:27:25 -07:00
..
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 perf: Fix documentation for sysctls perf_event_paranoid and perf_event_mlock_kb 2017-08-22 13:24:54 -03:00
net.txt bpf, doc: also add s390x as arch to sysctl description 2017-08-20 19:45:09 -07:00
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 mm, page_alloc: rip out ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE 2017-09-06 17:27:25 -07:00

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 :-)