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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 18:49:45 +0000
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+===============================
+Documentation for /proc/sys/vm/
+===============================
+
+kernel version 2.6.29
+
+Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>
+
+Copyright (c) 2008 Peter W. Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
+
+For general info and legal blurb, please look in index.rst.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This file contains the documentation for the sysctl files in
+/proc/sys/vm and is valid for Linux kernel version 2.6.29.
+
+The files in this directory can be used to tune the operation
+of the virtual memory (VM) subsystem of the Linux kernel and
+the writeout of dirty data to disk.
+
+Default values and initialization routines for most of these
+files can be found in mm/swap.c.
+
+Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
+
+- admin_reserve_kbytes
+- compact_memory
+- compaction_proactiveness
+- compact_unevictable_allowed
+- dirty_background_bytes
+- dirty_background_ratio
+- dirty_bytes
+- dirty_expire_centisecs
+- dirty_ratio
+- dirtytime_expire_seconds
+- dirty_writeback_centisecs
+- drop_caches
+- extfrag_threshold
+- highmem_is_dirtyable
+- hugetlb_shm_group
+- laptop_mode
+- legacy_va_layout
+- lowmem_reserve_ratio
+- max_map_count
+- memory_failure_early_kill
+- memory_failure_recovery
+- min_free_kbytes
+- min_slab_ratio
+- min_unmapped_ratio
+- mmap_min_addr
+- mmap_rnd_bits
+- mmap_rnd_compat_bits
+- nr_hugepages
+- nr_hugepages_mempolicy
+- nr_overcommit_hugepages
+- nr_trim_pages (only if CONFIG_MMU=n)
+- numa_zonelist_order
+- oom_dump_tasks
+- oom_kill_allocating_task
+- overcommit_kbytes
+- overcommit_memory
+- overcommit_ratio
+- page-cluster
+- page_lock_unfairness
+- panic_on_oom
+- percpu_pagelist_high_fraction
+- stat_interval
+- stat_refresh
+- numa_stat
+- swappiness
+- unprivileged_userfaultfd
+- user_reserve_kbytes
+- vfs_cache_pressure
+- watermark_boost_factor
+- watermark_scale_factor
+- zone_reclaim_mode
+
+
+admin_reserve_kbytes
+====================
+
+The amount of free memory in the system that should be reserved for users
+with the capability cap_sys_admin.
+
+admin_reserve_kbytes defaults to min(3% of free pages, 8MB)
+
+That should provide enough for the admin to log in and kill a process,
+if necessary, under the default overcommit 'guess' mode.
+
+Systems running under overcommit 'never' should increase this to account
+for the full Virtual Memory Size of programs used to recover. Otherwise,
+root may not be able to log in to recover the system.
+
+How do you calculate a minimum useful reserve?
+
+sshd or login + bash (or some other shell) + top (or ps, kill, etc.)
+
+For overcommit 'guess', we can sum resident set sizes (RSS).
+On x86_64 this is about 8MB.
+
+For overcommit 'never', we can take the max of their virtual sizes (VSZ)
+and add the sum of their RSS.
+On x86_64 this is about 128MB.
+
+Changing this takes effect whenever an application requests memory.
+
+
+compact_memory
+==============
+
+Available only when CONFIG_COMPACTION is set. When 1 is written to the file,
+all zones are compacted such that free memory is available in contiguous
+blocks where possible. This can be important for example in the allocation of
+huge pages although processes will also directly compact memory as required.
+
+compaction_proactiveness
+========================
+
+This tunable takes a value in the range [0, 100] with a default value of
+20. This tunable determines how aggressively compaction is done in the
+background. Write of a non zero value to this tunable will immediately
+trigger the proactive compaction. Setting it to 0 disables proactive compaction.
+
+Note that compaction has a non-trivial system-wide impact as pages
+belonging to different processes are moved around, which could also lead
+to latency spikes in unsuspecting applications. The kernel employs
+various heuristics to avoid wasting CPU cycles if it detects that
+proactive compaction is not being effective.
+
+Be careful when setting it to extreme values like 100, as that may
+cause excessive background compaction activity.
+
+compact_unevictable_allowed
+===========================
+
+Available only when CONFIG_COMPACTION is set. When set to 1, compaction is
+allowed to examine the unevictable lru (mlocked pages) for pages to compact.
+This should be used on systems where stalls for minor page faults are an
+acceptable trade for large contiguous free memory. Set to 0 to prevent
+compaction from moving pages that are unevictable. Default value is 1.
+On CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT the default value is 0 in order to avoid a page fault, due
+to compaction, which would block the task from becoming active until the fault
+is resolved.
+
+
+dirty_background_bytes
+======================
+
+Contains the amount of dirty memory at which the background kernel
+flusher threads will start writeback.
+
+Note:
+ dirty_background_bytes is the counterpart of dirty_background_ratio. Only
+ one of them may be specified at a time. When one sysctl is written it is
+ immediately taken into account to evaluate the dirty memory limits and the
+ other appears as 0 when read.
+
+
+dirty_background_ratio
+======================
+
+Contains, as a percentage of total available memory that contains free pages
+and reclaimable pages, the number of pages at which the background kernel
+flusher threads will start writing out dirty data.
+
+The total available memory is not equal to total system memory.
+
+
+dirty_bytes
+===========
+
+Contains the amount of dirty memory at which a process generating disk writes
+will itself start writeback.
+
+Note: dirty_bytes is the counterpart of dirty_ratio. Only one of them may be
+specified at a time. When one sysctl is written it is immediately taken into
+account to evaluate the dirty memory limits and the other appears as 0 when
+read.
+
+Note: the minimum value allowed for dirty_bytes is two pages (in bytes); any
+value lower than this limit will be ignored and the old configuration will be
+retained.
+
+
+dirty_expire_centisecs
+======================
+
+This tunable is used to define when dirty data is old enough to be eligible
+for writeout by the kernel flusher threads. It is expressed in 100'ths
+of a second. Data which has been dirty in-memory for longer than this
+interval will be written out next time a flusher thread wakes up.
+
+
+dirty_ratio
+===========
+
+Contains, as a percentage of total available memory that contains free pages
+and reclaimable pages, the number of pages at which a process which is
+generating disk writes will itself start writing out dirty data.
+
+The total available memory is not equal to total system memory.
+
+
+dirtytime_expire_seconds
+========================
+
+When a lazytime inode is constantly having its pages dirtied, the inode with
+an updated timestamp will never get chance to be written out. And, if the
+only thing that has happened on the file system is a dirtytime inode caused
+by an atime update, a worker will be scheduled to make sure that inode
+eventually gets pushed out to disk. This tunable is used to define when dirty
+inode is old enough to be eligible for writeback by the kernel flusher threads.
+And, it is also used as the interval to wakeup dirtytime_writeback thread.
+
+
+dirty_writeback_centisecs
+=========================
+
+The kernel flusher threads will periodically wake up and write `old` data
+out to disk. This tunable expresses the interval between those wakeups, in
+100'ths of a second.
+
+Setting this to zero disables periodic writeback altogether.
+
+
+drop_caches
+===========
+
+Writing to this will cause the kernel to drop clean caches, as well as
+reclaimable slab objects like dentries and inodes. Once dropped, their
+memory becomes free.
+
+To free pagecache::
+
+ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
+
+To free reclaimable slab objects (includes dentries and inodes)::
+
+ echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
+
+To free slab objects and pagecache::
+
+ echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
+
+This is a non-destructive operation and will not free any dirty objects.
+To increase the number of objects freed by this operation, the user may run
+`sync` prior to writing to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. This will minimize the
+number of dirty objects on the system and create more candidates to be
+dropped.
+
+This file is not a means to control the growth of the various kernel caches
+(inodes, dentries, pagecache, etc...) These objects are automatically
+reclaimed by the kernel when memory is needed elsewhere on the system.
+
+Use of this file can cause performance problems. Since it discards cached
+objects, it may cost a significant amount of I/O and CPU to recreate the
+dropped objects, especially if they were under heavy use. Because of this,
+use outside of a testing or debugging environment is not recommended.
+
+You may see informational messages in your kernel log when this file is
+used::
+
+ cat (1234): drop_caches: 3
+
+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.
+
+
+extfrag_threshold
+=================
+
+This parameter affects whether the kernel will compact memory or direct
+reclaim to satisfy a high-order allocation. The extfrag/extfrag_index file in
+debugfs shows what the fragmentation index for each order is in each zone in
+the system. Values tending towards 0 imply allocations would fail due to lack
+of memory, values towards 1000 imply failures are due to fragmentation and -1
+implies that the allocation will succeed as long as watermarks are met.
+
+The kernel will not compact memory in a zone if the
+fragmentation index is <= extfrag_threshold. The default value is 500.
+
+
+highmem_is_dirtyable
+====================
+
+Available only for systems with CONFIG_HIGHMEM enabled (32b systems).
+
+This parameter controls whether the high memory is considered for dirty
+writers throttling. This is not the case by default which means that
+only the amount of memory directly visible/usable by the kernel can
+be dirtied. As a result, on systems with a large amount of memory and
+lowmem basically depleted writers might be throttled too early and
+streaming writes can get very slow.
+
+Changing the value to non zero would allow more memory to be dirtied
+and thus allow writers to write more data which can be flushed to the
+storage more effectively. Note this also comes with a risk of pre-mature
+OOM killer because some writers (e.g. direct block device writes) can
+only use the low memory and they can fill it up with dirty data without
+any throttling.
+
+
+hugetlb_shm_group
+=================
+
+hugetlb_shm_group contains group id that is allowed to create SysV
+shared memory segment using hugetlb page.
+
+
+laptop_mode
+===========
+
+laptop_mode is a knob that controls "laptop mode". All the things that are
+controlled by this knob are discussed in Documentation/admin-guide/laptops/laptop-mode.rst.
+
+
+legacy_va_layout
+================
+
+If non-zero, this sysctl disables the new 32-bit mmap layout - the kernel
+will use the legacy (2.4) layout for all processes.
+
+
+lowmem_reserve_ratio
+====================
+
+For some specialised workloads on highmem machines it is dangerous for
+the kernel to allow process memory to be allocated from the "lowmem"
+zone. This is because that memory could then be pinned via the mlock()
+system call, or by unavailability of swapspace.
+
+And on large highmem machines this lack of reclaimable lowmem memory
+can be fatal.
+
+So the Linux page allocator has a mechanism which prevents allocations
+which *could* use highmem from using too much lowmem. This means that
+a certain amount of lowmem is defended from the possibility of being
+captured into pinned user memory.
+
+(The same argument applies to the old 16 megabyte ISA DMA region. This
+mechanism will also defend that region from allocations which could use
+highmem or lowmem).
+
+The `lowmem_reserve_ratio` tunable determines how aggressive the kernel is
+in defending these lower zones.
+
+If you have a machine which uses highmem or ISA DMA and your
+applications are using mlock(), or if you are running with no swap then
+you probably should change the lowmem_reserve_ratio setting.
+
+The lowmem_reserve_ratio is an array. You can see them by reading this file::
+
+ % cat /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio
+ 256 256 32
+
+But, these values are not used directly. The kernel calculates # of protection
+pages for each zones from them. These are shown as array of protection pages
+in /proc/zoneinfo like followings. (This is an example of x86-64 box).
+Each zone has an array of protection pages like this::
+
+ Node 0, zone DMA
+ pages free 1355
+ min 3
+ low 3
+ high 4
+ :
+ :
+ numa_other 0
+ protection: (0, 2004, 2004, 2004)
+ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+ pagesets
+ cpu: 0 pcp: 0
+ :
+
+These protections are added to score to judge whether this zone should be used
+for page allocation or should be reclaimed.
+
+In this example, if normal pages (index=2) are required to this DMA zone and
+watermark[WMARK_HIGH] is used for watermark, the kernel judges this zone should
+not be used because pages_free(1355) is smaller than watermark + protection[2]
+(4 + 2004 = 2008). If this protection value is 0, this zone would be used for
+normal page requirement. If requirement is DMA zone(index=0), protection[0]
+(=0) is used.
+
+zone[i]'s protection[j] is calculated by following expression::
+
+ (i < j):
+ zone[i]->protection[j]
+ = (total sums of managed_pages from zone[i+1] to zone[j] on the node)
+ / lowmem_reserve_ratio[i];
+ (i = j):
+ (should not be protected. = 0;
+ (i > j):
+ (not necessary, but looks 0)
+
+The default values of lowmem_reserve_ratio[i] are
+
+ === ====================================
+ 256 (if zone[i] means DMA or DMA32 zone)
+ 32 (others)
+ === ====================================
+
+As above expression, they are reciprocal number of ratio.
+256 means 1/256. # of protection pages becomes about "0.39%" of total managed
+pages of higher zones on the node.
+
+If you would like to protect more pages, smaller values are effective.
+The minimum value is 1 (1/1 -> 100%). The value less than 1 completely
+disables protection of the pages.
+
+
+max_map_count:
+==============
+
+This file contains the maximum number of memory map areas a process
+may have. Memory map areas are used as a side-effect of calling
+malloc, directly by mmap, mprotect, and madvise, and also when loading
+shared libraries.
+
+While most applications need less than a thousand maps, certain
+programs, particularly malloc debuggers, may consume lots of them,
+e.g., up to one or two maps per allocation.
+
+The default value is 65530.
+
+
+memory_failure_early_kill:
+==========================
+
+Control how to kill processes when uncorrected memory error (typically
+a 2bit error in a memory module) is detected in the background by hardware
+that cannot be handled by the kernel. In some cases (like the page
+still having a valid copy on disk) the kernel will handle the failure
+transparently without affecting any applications. But if there is
+no other uptodate copy of the data it will kill to prevent any data
+corruptions from propagating.
+
+1: Kill all processes that have the corrupted and not reloadable page mapped
+as soon as the corruption is detected. Note this is not supported
+for a few types of pages, like kernel internally allocated data or
+the swap cache, but works for the majority of user pages.
+
+0: Only unmap the corrupted page from all processes and only kill a process
+who tries to access it.
+
+The kill is done using a catchable SIGBUS with BUS_MCEERR_AO, so processes can
+handle this if they want to.
+
+This is only active on architectures/platforms with advanced machine
+check handling and depends on the hardware capabilities.
+
+Applications can override this setting individually with the PR_MCE_KILL prctl
+
+
+memory_failure_recovery
+=======================
+
+Enable memory failure recovery (when supported by the platform)
+
+1: Attempt recovery.
+
+0: Always panic on a memory failure.
+
+
+min_free_kbytes
+===============
+
+This is used to force the Linux VM to keep a minimum number
+of kilobytes free. The VM uses this number to compute a
+watermark[WMARK_MIN] value for each lowmem zone in the system.
+Each lowmem zone gets a number of reserved free pages based
+proportionally on its size.
+
+Some minimal amount of memory is needed to satisfy PF_MEMALLOC
+allocations; if you set this to lower than 1024KB, your system will
+become subtly broken, and prone to deadlock under high loads.
+
+Setting this too high will OOM your machine instantly.
+
+
+min_slab_ratio
+==============
+
+This is available only on NUMA kernels.
+
+A percentage of the total pages in each zone. On Zone reclaim
+(fallback from the local zone occurs) slabs will be reclaimed if more
+than this percentage of pages in a zone are reclaimable slab pages.
+This insures that the slab growth stays under control even in NUMA
+systems that rarely perform global reclaim.
+
+The default is 5 percent.
+
+Note that slab reclaim is triggered in a per zone / node fashion.
+The process of reclaiming slab memory is currently not node specific
+and may not be fast.
+
+
+min_unmapped_ratio
+==================
+
+This is available only on NUMA kernels.
+
+This is a percentage of the total pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will
+only occur if more than this percentage of pages are in a state that
+zone_reclaim_mode allows to be reclaimed.
+
+If zone_reclaim_mode has the value 4 OR'd, then the percentage is compared
+against all file-backed unmapped pages including swapcache pages and tmpfs
+files. Otherwise, only unmapped pages backed by normal files but not tmpfs
+files and similar are considered.
+
+The default is 1 percent.
+
+
+mmap_min_addr
+=============
+
+This file indicates the amount of address space which a user process will
+be restricted from mmapping. Since kernel null dereference bugs could
+accidentally operate based on the information in the first couple of pages
+of memory userspace processes should not be allowed to write to them. By
+default this value is set to 0 and no protections will be enforced by the
+security module. Setting this value to something like 64k will allow the
+vast majority of applications to work correctly and provide defense in depth
+against future potential kernel bugs.
+
+
+mmap_rnd_bits
+=============
+
+This value can be used to select the number of bits to use to
+determine the random offset to the base address of vma regions
+resulting from mmap allocations on architectures which support
+tuning address space randomization. This value will be bounded
+by the architecture's minimum and maximum supported values.
+
+This value can be changed after boot using the
+/proc/sys/vm/mmap_rnd_bits tunable
+
+
+mmap_rnd_compat_bits
+====================
+
+This value can be used to select the number of bits to use to
+determine the random offset to the base address of vma regions
+resulting from mmap allocations for applications run in
+compatibility mode on architectures which support tuning address
+space randomization. This value will be bounded by the
+architecture's minimum and maximum supported values.
+
+This value can be changed after boot using the
+/proc/sys/vm/mmap_rnd_compat_bits tunable
+
+
+nr_hugepages
+============
+
+Change the minimum size of the hugepage pool.
+
+See Documentation/admin-guide/mm/hugetlbpage.rst
+
+
+hugetlb_optimize_vmemmap
+========================
+
+This knob is not available when the size of 'struct page' (a structure defined
+in include/linux/mm_types.h) is not power of two (an unusual system config could
+result in this).
+
+Enable (set to 1) or disable (set to 0) HugeTLB Vmemmap Optimization (HVO).
+
+Once enabled, the vmemmap pages of subsequent allocation of HugeTLB pages from
+buddy allocator will be optimized (7 pages per 2MB HugeTLB page and 4095 pages
+per 1GB HugeTLB page), whereas already allocated HugeTLB pages will not be
+optimized. When those optimized HugeTLB pages are freed from the HugeTLB pool
+to the buddy allocator, the vmemmap pages representing that range needs to be
+remapped again and the vmemmap pages discarded earlier need to be rellocated
+again. If your use case is that HugeTLB pages are allocated 'on the fly' (e.g.
+never explicitly allocating HugeTLB pages with 'nr_hugepages' but only set
+'nr_overcommit_hugepages', those overcommitted HugeTLB pages are allocated 'on
+the fly') instead of being pulled from the HugeTLB pool, you should weigh the
+benefits of memory savings against the more overhead (~2x slower than before)
+of allocation or freeing HugeTLB pages between the HugeTLB pool and the buddy
+allocator. Another behavior to note is that if the system is under heavy memory
+pressure, it could prevent the user from freeing HugeTLB pages from the HugeTLB
+pool to the buddy allocator since the allocation of vmemmap pages could be
+failed, you have to retry later if your system encounter this situation.
+
+Once disabled, the vmemmap pages of subsequent allocation of HugeTLB pages from
+buddy allocator will not be optimized meaning the extra overhead at allocation
+time from buddy allocator disappears, whereas already optimized HugeTLB pages
+will not be affected. If you want to make sure there are no optimized HugeTLB
+pages, you can set "nr_hugepages" to 0 first and then disable this. Note that
+writing 0 to nr_hugepages will make any "in use" HugeTLB pages become surplus
+pages. So, those surplus pages are still optimized until they are no longer
+in use. You would need to wait for those surplus pages to be released before
+there are no optimized pages in the system.
+
+
+nr_hugepages_mempolicy
+======================
+
+Change the size of the hugepage pool at run-time on a specific
+set of NUMA nodes.
+
+See Documentation/admin-guide/mm/hugetlbpage.rst
+
+
+nr_overcommit_hugepages
+=======================
+
+Change the maximum size of the hugepage pool. The maximum is
+nr_hugepages + nr_overcommit_hugepages.
+
+See Documentation/admin-guide/mm/hugetlbpage.rst
+
+
+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/admin-guide/mm/nommu-mmap.rst for more information.
+
+
+numa_zonelist_order
+===================
+
+This sysctl is only for NUMA and it is deprecated. Anything but
+Node order will fail!
+
+'where the memory is allocated from' is controlled by zonelists.
+
+(This documentation ignores ZONE_HIGHMEM/ZONE_DMA32 for simple explanation.
+you may be able to read ZONE_DMA as ZONE_DMA32...)
+
+In non-NUMA case, a zonelist for GFP_KERNEL is ordered as following.
+ZONE_NORMAL -> ZONE_DMA
+This means that a memory allocation request for GFP_KERNEL will
+get memory from ZONE_DMA only when ZONE_NORMAL is not available.
+
+In NUMA case, you can think of following 2 types of order.
+Assume 2 node NUMA and below is zonelist of Node(0)'s GFP_KERNEL::
+
+ (A) Node(0) ZONE_NORMAL -> Node(0) ZONE_DMA -> Node(1) ZONE_NORMAL
+ (B) Node(0) ZONE_NORMAL -> Node(1) ZONE_NORMAL -> Node(0) ZONE_DMA.
+
+Type(A) offers the best locality for processes on Node(0), but ZONE_DMA
+will be used before ZONE_NORMAL exhaustion. This increases possibility of
+out-of-memory(OOM) of ZONE_DMA because ZONE_DMA is tend to be small.
+
+Type(B) cannot offer the best locality but is more robust against OOM of
+the DMA zone.
+
+Type(A) is called as "Node" order. Type (B) is "Zone" order.
+
+"Node order" orders the zonelists by node, then by zone within each node.
+Specify "[Nn]ode" for node order
+
+"Zone Order" orders the zonelists by zone type, then by node within each
+zone. Specify "[Zz]one" for zone order.
+
+Specify "[Dd]efault" to request automatic configuration.
+
+On 32-bit, the Normal zone needs to be preserved for allocations accessible
+by the kernel, so "zone" order will be selected.
+
+On 64-bit, devices that require DMA32/DMA are relatively rare, so "node"
+order will be selected.
+
+Default order is recommended unless this is causing problems for your
+system/application.
+
+
+oom_dump_tasks
+==============
+
+Enables a system-wide task dump (excluding kernel threads) to be produced
+when the kernel performs an OOM-killing and includes such information as
+pid, uid, tgid, vm size, rss, pgtables_bytes, swapents, oom_score_adj
+score, and name. This is helpful to determine why the OOM killer was
+invoked, to identify the rogue task that caused it, and to determine why
+the OOM killer chose the task it did to kill.
+
+If this is set to zero, this information is suppressed. On very
+large systems with thousands of tasks it may not be feasible to dump
+the memory state information for each one. Such systems should not
+be forced to incur a performance penalty in OOM conditions when the
+information may not be desired.
+
+If this is set to non-zero, this information is shown whenever the
+OOM killer actually kills a memory-hogging task.
+
+The default value is 1 (enabled).
+
+
+oom_kill_allocating_task
+========================
+
+This enables or disables killing the OOM-triggering task in
+out-of-memory situations.
+
+If this is set to zero, the OOM killer will scan through the entire
+tasklist and select a task based on heuristics to kill. This normally
+selects a rogue memory-hogging task that frees up a large amount of
+memory when killed.
+
+If this is set to non-zero, the OOM killer simply kills the task that
+triggered the out-of-memory condition. This avoids the expensive
+tasklist scan.
+
+If panic_on_oom is selected, it takes precedence over whatever value
+is used in oom_kill_allocating_task.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
+
+overcommit_kbytes
+=================
+
+When overcommit_memory is set to 2, the committed address space is not
+permitted to exceed swap plus this amount of physical RAM. See below.
+
+Note: overcommit_kbytes is the counterpart of overcommit_ratio. Only one
+of them may be specified at a time. Setting one disables the other (which
+then appears as 0 when read).
+
+
+overcommit_memory
+=================
+
+This value contains a flag that enables memory overcommitment.
+
+When this flag is 0, the kernel attempts to estimate the amount
+of free memory left when userspace requests more memory.
+
+When this flag is 1, the kernel pretends there is always enough
+memory until it actually runs out.
+
+When this flag is 2, the kernel uses a "never overcommit"
+policy that attempts to prevent any overcommit of memory.
+Note that user_reserve_kbytes affects this policy.
+
+This feature can be very useful because there are a lot of
+programs that malloc() huge amounts of memory "just-in-case"
+and don't use much of it.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
+See Documentation/mm/overcommit-accounting.rst and
+mm/util.c::__vm_enough_memory() for more information.
+
+
+overcommit_ratio
+================
+
+When overcommit_memory is set to 2, the committed address
+space is not permitted to exceed swap plus this percentage
+of physical RAM. See above.
+
+
+page-cluster
+============
+
+page-cluster controls the number of pages up to which consecutive pages
+are read in from swap in a single attempt. This is the swap counterpart
+to page cache readahead.
+The mentioned consecutivity is not in terms of virtual/physical addresses,
+but consecutive on swap space - that means they were swapped out together.
+
+It is a logarithmic value - setting it to zero means "1 page", setting
+it to 1 means "2 pages", setting it to 2 means "4 pages", etc.
+Zero disables swap readahead completely.
+
+The default value is three (eight pages at a time). There may be some
+small benefits in tuning this to a different value if your workload is
+swap-intensive.
+
+Lower values mean lower latencies for initial faults, but at the same time
+extra faults and I/O delays for following faults if they would have been part of
+that consecutive pages readahead would have brought in.
+
+
+page_lock_unfairness
+====================
+
+This value determines the number of times that the page lock can be
+stolen from under a waiter. After the lock is stolen the number of times
+specified in this file (default is 5), the "fair lock handoff" semantics
+will apply, and the waiter will only be awakened if the lock can be taken.
+
+panic_on_oom
+============
+
+This enables or disables panic on out-of-memory feature.
+
+If this is set to 0, the kernel will kill some rogue process,
+called oom_killer. Usually, oom_killer can kill rogue processes and
+system will survive.
+
+If this is set to 1, the kernel panics when out-of-memory happens.
+However, if a process limits using nodes by mempolicy/cpusets,
+and those nodes become memory exhaustion status, one process
+may be killed by oom-killer. No panic occurs in this case.
+Because other nodes' memory may be free. This means system total status
+may be not fatal yet.
+
+If this is set to 2, the kernel panics compulsorily even on the
+above-mentioned. Even oom happens under memory cgroup, the whole
+system panics.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
+1 and 2 are for failover of clustering. Please select either
+according to your policy of failover.
+
+panic_on_oom=2+kdump gives you very strong tool to investigate
+why oom happens. You can get snapshot.
+
+
+percpu_pagelist_high_fraction
+=============================
+
+This is the fraction of pages in each zone that are can be stored to
+per-cpu page lists. It is an upper boundary that is divided depending
+on the number of online CPUs. The min value for this is 8 which means
+that we do not allow more than 1/8th of pages in each zone to be stored
+on per-cpu page lists. This entry only changes the value of hot per-cpu
+page lists. A user can specify a number like 100 to allocate 1/100th of
+each zone between per-cpu lists.
+
+The batch value of each per-cpu page list remains the same regardless of
+the value of the high fraction so allocation latencies are unaffected.
+
+The initial value is zero. Kernel uses this value to set the high pcp->high
+mark based on the low watermark for the zone and the number of local
+online CPUs. If the user writes '0' to this sysctl, it will revert to
+this default behavior.
+
+
+stat_interval
+=============
+
+The time interval between which vm statistics are updated. The default
+is 1 second.
+
+
+stat_refresh
+============
+
+Any read or write (by root only) flushes all the per-cpu vm statistics
+into their global totals, for more accurate reports when testing
+e.g. cat /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh /proc/meminfo
+
+As a side-effect, it also checks for negative totals (elsewhere reported
+as 0) and "fails" with EINVAL if any are found, with a warning in dmesg.
+(At time of writing, a few stats are known sometimes to be found negative,
+with no ill effects: errors and warnings on these stats are suppressed.)
+
+
+numa_stat
+=========
+
+This interface allows runtime configuration of numa statistics.
+
+When page allocation performance becomes a bottleneck and you can tolerate
+some possible tool breakage and decreased numa counter precision, you can
+do::
+
+ echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/numa_stat
+
+When page allocation performance is not a bottleneck and you want all
+tooling to work, you can do::
+
+ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/numa_stat
+
+
+swappiness
+==========
+
+This control is used to define the rough relative IO cost of swapping
+and filesystem paging, as a value between 0 and 200. At 100, the VM
+assumes equal IO cost and will thus apply memory pressure to the page
+cache and swap-backed pages equally; lower values signify more
+expensive swap IO, higher values indicates cheaper.
+
+Keep in mind that filesystem IO patterns under memory pressure tend to
+be more efficient than swap's random IO. An optimal value will require
+experimentation and will also be workload-dependent.
+
+The default value is 60.
+
+For in-memory swap, like zram or zswap, as well as hybrid setups that
+have swap on faster devices than the filesystem, values beyond 100 can
+be considered. For example, if the random IO against the swap device
+is on average 2x faster than IO from the filesystem, swappiness should
+be 133 (x + 2x = 200, 2x = 133.33).
+
+At 0, the kernel will not initiate swap until the amount of free and
+file-backed pages is less than the high watermark in a zone.
+
+
+unprivileged_userfaultfd
+========================
+
+This flag controls the mode in which unprivileged users can use the
+userfaultfd system calls. Set this to 0 to restrict unprivileged users
+to handle page faults in user mode only. In this case, users without
+SYS_CAP_PTRACE must pass UFFD_USER_MODE_ONLY in order for userfaultfd to
+succeed. Prohibiting use of userfaultfd for handling faults from kernel
+mode may make certain vulnerabilities more difficult to exploit.
+
+Set this to 1 to allow unprivileged users to use the userfaultfd system
+calls without any restrictions.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
+Another way to control permissions for userfaultfd is to use
+/dev/userfaultfd instead of userfaultfd(2). See
+Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst.
+
+user_reserve_kbytes
+===================
+
+When overcommit_memory is set to 2, "never overcommit" mode, reserve
+min(3% of current process size, user_reserve_kbytes) of free memory.
+This is intended to prevent a user from starting a single memory hogging
+process, such that they cannot recover (kill the hog).
+
+user_reserve_kbytes defaults to min(3% of the current process size, 128MB).
+
+If this is reduced to zero, then the user will be allowed to allocate
+all free memory with a single process, minus admin_reserve_kbytes.
+Any subsequent attempts to execute a command will result in
+"fork: Cannot allocate memory".
+
+Changing this takes effect whenever an application requests memory.
+
+
+vfs_cache_pressure
+==================
+
+This percentage value controls the tendency of the kernel to reclaim
+the memory which is used for caching of directory and inode objects.
+
+At the default value of vfs_cache_pressure=100 the kernel will attempt to
+reclaim dentries and inodes at a "fair" rate with respect to pagecache and
+swapcache reclaim. Decreasing vfs_cache_pressure causes the kernel to prefer
+to retain dentry and inode caches. When vfs_cache_pressure=0, the kernel will
+never reclaim dentries and inodes due to memory pressure and this can easily
+lead to out-of-memory conditions. Increasing vfs_cache_pressure beyond 100
+causes the kernel to prefer to reclaim dentries and inodes.
+
+Increasing vfs_cache_pressure significantly beyond 100 may have negative
+performance impact. Reclaim code needs to take various locks to find freeable
+directory and inode objects. With vfs_cache_pressure=1000, it will look for
+ten times more freeable objects than there are.
+
+
+watermark_boost_factor
+======================
+
+This factor controls the level of reclaim when memory is being fragmented.
+It defines the percentage of the high watermark of a zone that will be
+reclaimed if pages of different mobility are being mixed within pageblocks.
+The intent is that compaction has less work to do in the future and to
+increase the success rate of future high-order allocations such as SLUB
+allocations, THP and hugetlbfs pages.
+
+To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor
+parameter, the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of
+15,000 means that up to 150% of the high watermark will be reclaimed in the
+event of a pageblock being mixed due to fragmentation. The level of reclaim
+is determined by the number of fragmentation events that occurred in the
+recent past. If this value is smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks
+worth of pages will be reclaimed (e.g. 2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor
+of 0 will disable the feature.
+
+
+watermark_scale_factor
+======================
+
+This factor controls the aggressiveness of kswapd. It defines the
+amount of memory left in a node/system before kswapd is woken up and
+how much memory needs to be free before kswapd goes back to sleep.
+
+The unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of 10 means the
+distances between watermarks are 0.1% of the available memory in the
+node/system. The maximum value is 3000, or 30% of memory.
+
+A high rate of threads entering direct reclaim (allocstall) or kswapd
+going to sleep prematurely (kswapd_low_wmark_hit_quickly) can indicate
+that the number of free pages kswapd maintains for latency reasons is
+too small for the allocation bursts occurring in the system. This knob
+can then be used to tune kswapd aggressiveness accordingly.
+
+
+zone_reclaim_mode
+=================
+
+Zone_reclaim_mode allows someone to set more or less aggressive approaches to
+reclaim memory when a zone runs out of memory. If it is set to zero then no
+zone reclaim occurs. Allocations will be satisfied from other zones / nodes
+in the system.
+
+This is value OR'ed together of
+
+= ===================================
+1 Zone reclaim on
+2 Zone reclaim writes dirty pages out
+4 Zone reclaim swaps pages
+= ===================================
+
+zone_reclaim_mode is disabled by default. For file servers or workloads
+that benefit from having their data cached, zone_reclaim_mode should be
+left disabled as the caching effect is likely to be more important than
+data locality.
+
+Consider enabling one or more zone_reclaim mode bits if it's known that the
+workload is partitioned such that each partition fits within a NUMA node
+and that accessing remote memory would cause a measurable performance
+reduction. The page allocator will take additional actions before
+allocating off node pages.
+
+Allowing zone reclaim to write out pages stops processes that are
+writing large amounts of data from dirtying pages on other nodes. Zone
+reclaim will write out dirty pages if a zone fills up and so effectively
+throttle the process. This may decrease the performance of a single process
+since it cannot use all of system memory to buffer the outgoing writes
+anymore but it preserve the memory on other nodes so that the performance
+of other processes running on other nodes will not be affected.
+
+Allowing regular swap effectively restricts allocations to the local
+node unless explicitly overridden by memory policies or cpuset
+configurations.