linux_old1/Documentation/sysctl
Daniel Bristot de Oliveira 088e9d253d rcu: sysctl: Panic on RCU Stall
It is not always easy to determine the cause of an RCU stall just by
analysing the RCU stall messages, mainly when the problem is caused
by the indirect starvation of rcu threads. For example, when preempt_rcu
is not awakened due to the starvation of a timer softirq.

We have been hard coding panic() in the RCU stall functions for
some time while testing the kernel-rt. But this is not possible in
some scenarios, like when supporting customers.

This patch implements the sysctl kernel.panic_on_rcu_stall. If
set to 1, the system will panic() when an RCU stall takes place,
enabling the capture of a vmcore. The vmcore provides a way to analyze
all kernel/tasks states, helping out to point to the culprit and the
solution for the stall.

The kernel.panic_on_rcu_stall sysctl is disabled by default.

Changes from v1:
- Fixed a typo in the git log
- The if(sysctl_panic_on_rcu_stall) panic() is in a static function
- Fixed the CONFIG_TINY_RCU compilation issue
- The var sysctl_panic_on_rcu_stall is now __read_mostly

Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Lai Jiangshan <jiangshanlai@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Reviewed-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org>
Tested-by: "Luis Claudio R. Goncalves" <lgoncalv@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Bristot de Oliveira <bristot@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2016-06-15 16:00:05 -07:00
..
00-INDEX sysctl: remove obsolete comments 2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
README
abi.txt
fs.txt pipe: limit the per-user amount of pages allocated in pipes 2016-01-19 19:25:21 -05:00
kernel.txt rcu: sysctl: Panic on RCU Stall 2016-06-15 16:00:05 -07:00
net.txt bpf: add generic constant blinding for use in jits 2016-05-16 13:49:32 -04:00
sunrpc.txt
vm.txt mm: /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force vmstat update 2016-05-19 19:12:14 -07:00

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/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 :-)