linux/Documentation/sysctl
Kemi Wang 4518085e12 mm, sysctl: make NUMA stats configurable
This is the second step which introduces a tunable interface that allow
numa stats configurable for optimizing zone_statistics(), as suggested
by Dave Hansen and Ying Huang.

=========================================================================

When page allocation performance becomes a bottleneck and you can
tolerate some possible tool breakage and decreased numa counter
precision, you can do:

	echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/numa_stat

In this case, numa counter update is ignored.  We can see about
*4.8%*(185->176) drop of cpu cycles per single page allocation and
reclaim on Jesper's page_bench01 (single thread) and *8.1%*(343->315)
drop of cpu cycles per single page allocation and reclaim on Jesper's
page_bench03 (88 threads) running on a 2-Socket Broadwell-based server
(88 threads, 126G memory).

Benchmark link provided by Jesper D Brouer (increase loop times to
10000000):

  https://github.com/netoptimizer/prototype-kernel/tree/master/kernel/mm/bench

=========================================================================

When page allocation performance is not a bottleneck and you want all
tooling to work, you can do:

	echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/numa_stat

This is system default setting.

Many thanks to Michal Hocko, Dave Hansen, Ying Huang and Vlastimil Babka
for comments to help improve the original patch.

[keescook@chromium.org: make sure mutex is a global static]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171107213809.GA4314@beast
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1508290927-8518-1-git-send-email-kemi.wang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Kemi Wang <kemi.wang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Reported-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Suggested-by: Ying Huang <ying.huang@intel.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: "Luis R . Rodriguez" <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>
Cc: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2017-11-15 18:21:07 -08:00
..
00-INDEX sysctl: remove obsolete comments 2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
README docs: Update binfmt_misc links 2017-10-03 15:23:38 -06:00
abi.txt
fs.txt docs: Update binfmt_misc links 2017-10-03 15:23:38 -06:00
kernel.txt Major additions: 2017-09-22 16:16:41 -10:00
net.txt bpf, doc: Add arm32 as arch supporting eBPF JIT 2017-08-23 22:40:12 -07:00
sunrpc.txt
user.txt userns; Document per user per user namespace limits. 2016-09-22 12:52:03 -05:00
vm.txt mm, sysctl: make NUMA stats configurable 2017-11-15 18:21:07 -08:00

README

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/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst>
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 :-)