From 2f42fa9141974d917c5a85fc484e48f53cf7ec71 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Rik van Riel Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 15:26:50 -0400 Subject: add extra free kbytes tunable Add a userspace visible knob to tell the VM to keep an extra amount of memory free, by increasing the gap between each zone's min and low watermarks. This is useful for realtime applications that call system calls and have a bound on the number of allocations that happen in any short time period. In this application, extra_free_kbytes would be left at an amount equal to or larger than than the maximum number of allocations that happen in any burst. It may also be useful to reduce the memory use of virtual machines (temporarily?), in a way that does not cause memory fragmentation like ballooning does. [ccross] Revived for use on old kernels where no other solution exists. The tunable will be removed on kernels that do better at avoiding direct reclaim. Change-Id: I765a42be8e964bfd3e2886d1ca85a29d60c3bb3e Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel Signed-off-by: Colin Cross --- Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation') diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt index dcc75a9ed91..b81fca90f7f 100644 --- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt +++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt @@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm: - dirty_writeback_centisecs - drop_caches - extfrag_threshold +- extra_free_kbytes - hugepages_treat_as_movable - hugetlb_shm_group - laptop_mode @@ -198,6 +199,21 @@ fragmentation index is <= extfrag_threshold. The default value is 500. ============================================================== +extra_free_kbytes + +This parameter tells the VM to keep extra free memory between the threshold +where background reclaim (kswapd) kicks in, and the threshold where direct +reclaim (by allocating processes) kicks in. + +This is useful for workloads that require low latency memory allocations +and have a bounded burstiness in memory allocations, for example a +realtime application that receives and transmits network traffic +(causing in-kernel memory allocations) with a maximum total message burst +size of 200MB may need 200MB of extra free memory to avoid direct reclaim +related latencies. + +============================================================== + hugepages_treat_as_movable This parameter is only useful when kernelcore= is specified at boot time to -- cgit v1.2.3