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-rw-r--r--Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst38
1 files changed, 38 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
index e86c968a7a0e..f48eaa98d22d 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
@@ -36,6 +36,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- dirtytime_expire_seconds
- dirty_writeback_centisecs
- drop_caches
+- enable_soft_offline
- extfrag_threshold
- highmem_is_dirtyable
- hugetlb_shm_group
@@ -267,6 +268,43 @@ used::
These are informational only. They do not mean that anything is wrong
with your system. To disable them, echo 4 (bit 2) into drop_caches.
+enable_soft_offline
+===================
+Correctable memory errors are very common on servers. Soft-offline is kernel's
+solution for memory pages having (excessive) corrected memory errors.
+
+For different types of page, soft-offline has different behaviors / costs.
+
+- For a raw error page, soft-offline migrates the in-use page's content to
+ a new raw page.
+
+- For a page that is part of a transparent hugepage, soft-offline splits the
+ transparent hugepage into raw pages, then migrates only the raw error page.
+ As a result, user is transparently backed by 1 less hugepage, impacting
+ memory access performance.
+
+- For a page that is part of a HugeTLB hugepage, soft-offline first migrates
+ the entire HugeTLB hugepage, during which a free hugepage will be consumed
+ as migration target. Then the original hugepage is dissolved into raw
+ pages without compensation, reducing the capacity of the HugeTLB pool by 1.
+
+It is user's call to choose between reliability (staying away from fragile
+physical memory) vs performance / capacity implications in transparent and
+HugeTLB cases.
+
+For all architectures, enable_soft_offline controls whether to soft offline
+memory pages. When set to 1, kernel attempts to soft offline the pages
+whenever it thinks needed. When set to 0, kernel returns EOPNOTSUPP to
+the request to soft offline the pages. Its default value is 1.
+
+It is worth mentioning that after setting enable_soft_offline to 0, the
+following requests to soft offline pages will not be performed:
+
+- Request to soft offline pages from RAS Correctable Errors Collector.
+
+- On ARM, the request to soft offline pages from GHES driver.
+
+- On PARISC, the request to soft offline pages from Page Deallocation Table.
extfrag_threshold
=================