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authorPaul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>2009-01-08 12:04:47 +0000
committerDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>2009-01-08 12:04:47 +0000
commitdd8632a12e500a684478fea0951f380478d56fed (patch)
tree1a12f441f9de14fd233faa92cf13a5fbb0319f41 /Documentation/sysctl
parent8feae13110d60cc6287afabc2887366b0eb226c2 (diff)
downloadlwn-dd8632a12e500a684478fea0951f380478d56fed.tar.gz
lwn-dd8632a12e500a684478fea0951f380478d56fed.zip
NOMMU: Make mmap allocation page trimming behaviour configurable.
NOMMU mmap allocates a piece of memory for an mmap that's rounded up in size to the nearest power-of-2 number of pages. Currently it then discards the excess pages back to the page allocator, making that memory available for use by other things. This can, however, cause greater amount of fragmentation. To counter this, a sysctl is added in order to fine-tune the trimming behaviour. The default behaviour remains to trim pages aggressively, while this can either be disabled completely or set to a higher page-granular watermark in order to have finer-grained control. vm region vm_top bits taken from an earlier patch by David Howells. Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org> Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Tested-by: Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt18
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index cd05994a49e6..a3415070bcac 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -38,6 +38,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- numa_zonelist_order
- nr_hugepages
- nr_overcommit_hugepages
+- nr_trim_pages (only if CONFIG_MMU=n)
==============================================================
@@ -348,3 +349,20 @@ Change the maximum size of the hugepage pool. The maximum is
nr_hugepages + nr_overcommit_hugepages.
See Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt
+
+==============================================================
+
+nr_trim_pages
+
+This is available only on NOMMU kernels.
+
+This value adjusts the excess page trimming behaviour of power-of-2 aligned
+NOMMU mmap allocations.
+
+A value of 0 disables trimming of allocations entirely, while a value of 1
+trims excess pages aggressively. Any value >= 1 acts as the watermark where
+trimming of allocations is initiated.
+
+The default value is 1.
+
+See Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt for more information.