linux/Documentation/sysctl
Rik van Riel de1c9ce6f0 sched/numa: Skip some page migrations after a shared fault
Shared faults can lead to lots of unnecessary page migrations,
slowing down the system, and causing private faults to hit the
per-pgdat migration ratelimit.

This patch adds sysctl numa_balancing_migrate_deferred, which specifies
how many shared page migrations to skip unconditionally, after each page
migration that is skipped because it is a shared fault.

This reduces the number of page migrations back and forth in
shared fault situations. It also gives a strong preference to
the tasks that are already running where most of the memory is,
and to moving the other tasks to near the memory.

Testing this with a much higher scan rate than the default
still seems to result in fewer page migrations than before.

Memory seems to be somewhat better consolidated than previously,
with multi-instance specjbb runs on a 4 node system.

Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1381141781-10992-62-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
2013-10-09 14:48:21 +02:00
..
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 sched/numa: Skip some page migrations after a shared fault 2013-10-09 14:48:21 +02:00
net.txt qdisc: allow setting default queuing discipline 2013-08-31 00:32:32 -04:00
README
sunrpc.txt
vm.txt mm: prepare to remove /proc/sys/vm/hugepages_treat_as_movable 2013-09-11 15:57:49 -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 :-)