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There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and a load of blog posts suggesting that using "drop_caches" periodically keeps your system running in "tip top shape". Perhaps adding some kernel documentation will increase the amount of accurate data on its use. If we are not shrinking caches effectively, then we have real bugs. Using drop_caches will simply mask the bugs and make them harder to find, but certainly does not fix them, nor is it an appropriate "workaround" to limit the size of the caches. On the contrary, there have been bug reports on issues that turned out to be misguided use of cache dropping. Dropping caches is a very drastic and disruptive operation that is good for debugging and running tests, but if it creates bug reports from production use, kernel developers should be aware of its use. Add a bit more documentation about it, a syslog message to track down abusers, and vmstat drop counters to help analyze problem reports. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: checkpatch fixes] [hannes@cmpxchg.org: add runtime suppression control] Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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| abi.txt | ||
| fs.txt | ||
| kernel.txt | ||
| net.txt | ||
| 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 :-)