linux/Documentation/sysctl
Erik Hugne a5325ae5b8 tipc: add name distributor resiliency queue
TIPC name table updates are distributed asynchronously in a cluster,
entailing a risk of certain race conditions. E.g., if two nodes
simultaneously issue conflicting (overlapping) publications, this may
not be detected until both publications have reached a third node, in
which case one of the publications will be silently dropped on that
node. Hence, we end up with an inconsistent name table.

In most cases this conflict is just a temporary race, e.g., one
node is issuing a publication under the assumption that a previous,
conflicting, publication has already been withdrawn by the other node.
However, because of the (rtt related) distributed update delay, this
may not yet hold true on all nodes. The symptom of this failure is a
syslog message: "tipc: Cannot publish {%u,%u,%u}, overlap error".

In this commit we add a resiliency queue at the receiving end of
the name table distributor. When insertion of an arriving publication
fails, we retain it in this queue for a short amount of time, assuming
that another update will arrive very soon and clear the conflict. If so
happens, we insert the publication, otherwise we drop it.

The (configurable) retention value defaults to 2000 ms. Knowing from
experience that the situation described above is extremely rare, there
is no risk that the queue will accumulate any large number of items.

Signed-off-by: Erik Hugne <erik.hugne@ericsson.com>
Signed-off-by: Jon Maloy <jon.maloy@ericsson.com>
Acked-by: Ying Xue <ying.xue@windriver.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
2014-09-01 17:51:48 -07:00
..
00-INDEX sysctl: remove obsolete comments 2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
abi.txt
fs.txt Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2012-08-01 10:26:23 -07:00
kernel.txt panic: add TAINT_SOFTLOCKUP 2014-08-08 15:57:24 -07:00
net.txt tipc: add name distributor resiliency queue 2014-09-01 17:51:48 -07:00
README
sunrpc.txt
vm.txt mm, pcp: allow restoring percpu_pagelist_fraction default 2014-06-23 16:47:43 -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

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 :-)