kernel/linux.git/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst, branch v6.18.21

docs: Remove colon from ctltable title in vm.rst

2025-07-23T09:57:05+00:00

Removing them solves an issue where they were incorrectly considered as not implemented by the check-sysctl-docs script Signed-off-by: Joel Granados

Merge tag 'mm-stable-2025-05-31-14-50' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm

2025-05-31T22:44:16+00:00

Pull MM updates from Andrew Morton: - "Add folio_mk_pte()" from Matthew Wilcox simplifies the act of creating a pte which addresses the first page in a folio and reduces the amount of plumbing which architecture must implement to provide this. - "Misc folio patches for 6.16" from Matthew Wilcox is a shower of largely unrelated folio infrastructure changes which clean things up and better prepare us for future work. - "memory,x86,acpi: hotplug memory alignment advisement" from Gregory Price adds early-init code to prevent x86 from leaving physical memory unused when physical address regions are not aligned to memory block size. - "mm/compaction: allow more aggressive proactive compaction" from Michal Clapinski provides some tuning of the (sadly, hard-coded (more sadly, not auto-tuned)) thresholds for our invokation of proactive compaction. In a simple test case, the reduction of a guest VM's memory consumption was dramatic. - "Minor cleanups and improvements to swap freeing code" from Kemeng Shi provides some code cleaups and a small efficiency improvement to this part of our swap handling code. - "ptrace: introduce PTRACE_SET_SYSCALL_INFO API" from Dmitry Levin adds the ability for a ptracer to modify syscalls arguments. At this time we can alter only "system call information that are used by strace system call tampering, namely, syscall number, syscall arguments, and syscall return value. This series should have been incorporated into mm.git's "non-MM" branch, but I goofed. - "fs/proc: extend the PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl to report guard regions" from Andrei Vagin extends the info returned by the PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl against /proc/pid/pagemap. This permits CRIU to more efficiently get at the info about guard regions. - "Fix parameter passed to page_mapcount_is_type()" from Gavin Shan implements that fix. No runtime effect is expected because validate_page_before_insert() happens to fix up this error. - "kernel/events/uprobes: uprobe_write_opcode() rewrite" from David Hildenbrand basically brings uprobe text poking into the current decade. Remove a bunch of hand-rolled implementation in favor of using more current facilities. - "mm/ptdump: Drop assumption that pxd_val() is u64" from Anshuman Khandual provides enhancements and generalizations to the pte dumping code. This might be needed when 128-bit Page Table Descriptors are enabled for ARM. - "Always call constructor for kernel page tables" from Kevin Brodsky ensures that the ctor/dtor is always called for kernel pgtables, as it already is for user pgtables. This permits the addition of more functionality such as "insert hooks to protect page tables". This change does result in various architectures performing unnecesary work, but this is fixed up where it is anticipated to occur. - "Rust support for mm_struct, vm_area_struct, and mmap" from Alice Ryhl adds plumbing to permit Rust access to core MM structures. - "fix incorrectly disallowed anonymous VMA merges" from Lorenzo Stoakes takes advantage of some VMA merging opportunities which we've been missing for 15 years. - "mm/madvise: batch tlb flushes for MADV_DONTNEED and MADV_FREE" from SeongJae Park optimizes process_madvise()'s TLB flushing. Instead of flushing each address range in the provided iovec, we batch the flushing across all the iovec entries. The syscall's cost was approximately halved with a microbenchmark which was designed to load this particular operation. - "Track node vacancy to reduce worst case allocation counts" from Sidhartha Kumar makes the maple tree smarter about its node preallocation. stress-ng mmap performance increased by single-digit percentages and the amount of unnecessarily preallocated memory was dramaticelly reduced. - "mm/gup: Minor fix, cleanup and improvements" from Baoquan He removes a few unnecessary things which Baoquan noted when reading the code. - ""Enhance sysfs handling for memory hotplug in weighted interleave" from Rakie Kim "enhances the weighted interleave policy in the memory management subsystem by improving sysfs handling, fixing memory leaks, and introducing dynamic sysfs updates for memory hotplug support". Fixes things on error paths which we are unlikely to hit. - "mm/damon: auto-tune DAMOS for NUMA setups including tiered memory" from SeongJae Park introduces new DAMOS quota goal metrics which eliminate the manual tuning which is required when utilizing DAMON for memory tiering. - "mm/vmalloc.c: code cleanup and improvements" from Baoquan He provides cleanups and small efficiency improvements which Baoquan found via code inspection. - "vmscan: enforce mems_effective during demotion" from Gregory Price changes reclaim to respect cpuset.mems_effective during demotion when possible. because presently, reclaim explicitly ignores cpuset.mems_effective when demoting, which may cause the cpuset settings to violated. This is useful for isolating workloads on a multi-tenant system from certain classes of memory more consistently. - "Clean up split_huge_pmd_locked() and remove unnecessary folio pointers" from Gavin Guo provides minor cleanups and efficiency gains in in the huge page splitting and migrating code. - "Use kmem_cache for memcg alloc" from Huan Yang creates a slab cache for `struct mem_cgroup', yielding improved memory utilization. - "add max arg to swappiness in memory.reclaim and lru_gen" from Zhongkun He adds a new "max" argument to the "swappiness=" argument for memory.reclaim MGLRU's lru_gen. This directs proactive reclaim to reclaim from only anon folios rather than file-backed folios. - "kexec: introduce Kexec HandOver (KHO)" from Mike Rapoport is the first step on the path to permitting the kernel to maintain existing VMs while replacing the host kernel via file-based kexec. At this time only memblock's reserve_mem is preserved. - "mm: Introduce for_each_valid_pfn()" from David Woodhouse provides and uses a smarter way of looping over a pfn range. By skipping ranges of invalid pfns. - "sched/numa: Skip VMA scanning on memory pinned to one NUMA node via cpuset.mems" from Libo Chen removes a lot of pointless VMA scanning when a task is pinned a single NUMA mode. Dramatic performance benefits were seen in some real world cases. - "JFS: Implement migrate_folio for jfs_metapage_aops" from Shivank Garg addresses a warning which occurs during memory compaction when using JFS. - "move all VMA allocation, freeing and duplication logic to mm" from Lorenzo Stoakes moves some VMA code from kernel/fork.c into the more appropriate mm/vma.c. - "mm, swap: clean up swap cache mapping helper" from Kairui Song provides code consolidation and cleanups related to the folio_index() function. - "mm/gup: Cleanup memfd_pin_folios()" from Vishal Moola does that. - "memcg: Fix test_memcg_min/low test failures" from Waiman Long addresses some bogus failures which are being reported by the test_memcontrol selftest. - "eliminate mmap() retry merge, add .mmap_prepare hook" from Lorenzo Stoakes commences the deprecation of file_operations.mmap() in favor of the new file_operations.mmap_prepare(). The latter is more restrictive and prevents drivers from messing with things in ways which, amongst other problems, may defeat VMA merging. - "memcg: decouple memcg and objcg stocks"" from Shakeel Butt decouples the per-cpu memcg charge cache from the objcg's one. This is a step along the way to making memcg and objcg charging NMI-safe, which is a BPF requirement. - "mm/damon: minor fixups and improvements for code, tests, and documents" from SeongJae Park is yet another batch of miscellaneous DAMON changes. Fix and improve minor problems in code, tests and documents. - "memcg: make memcg stats irq safe" from Shakeel Butt converts memcg stats to be irq safe. Another step along the way to making memcg charging and stats updates NMI-safe, a BPF requirement. - "Let unmap_hugepage_range() and several related functions take folio instead of page" from Fan Ni provides folio conversions in the hugetlb code. * tag 'mm-stable-2025-05-31-14-50' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm: (285 commits) mm: pcp: increase pcp->free_count threshold to trigger free_high mm/hugetlb: convert use of struct page to folio in __unmap_hugepage_range() mm/hugetlb: refactor __unmap_hugepage_range() to take folio instead of page mm/hugetlb: refactor unmap_hugepage_range() to take folio instead of page mm/hugetlb: pass folio instead of page to unmap_ref_private() memcg: objcg stock trylock without irq disabling memcg: no stock lock for cpu hot-unplug memcg: make __mod_memcg_lruvec_state re-entrant safe against irqs memcg: make count_memcg_events re-entrant safe against irqs memcg: make mod_memcg_state re-entrant safe against irqs memcg: move preempt disable to callers of memcg_rstat_updated memcg: memcg_rstat_updated re-entrant safe against irqs mm: khugepaged: decouple SHMEM and file folios' collapse selftests/eventfd: correct test name and improve messages alloc_tag: check mem_profiling_support in alloc_tag_init Docs/damon: update titles and brief introductions to explain DAMOS selftests/damon/_damon_sysfs: read tried regions directories in order mm/damon/tests/core-kunit: add a test for damos_set_filters_default_reject() mm/damon/paddr: remove unused variable, folio_list, in damon_pa_stat() mm/damon/sysfs-schemes: fix wrong comment on damons_sysfs_quota_goal_metric_strs ...

vfs: Add sysctl vfs_cache_pressure_denom for bulk file operations

2025-05-15T09:12:59+00:00

On our HDFS servers with 12 HDDs per server, a HDFS datanode[0] startup involves scanning all files and caching their metadata (including dentries and inodes) in memory. Each HDD contains approximately 2 million files, resulting in a total of ~20 million cached dentries after initialization. To minimize dentry reclamation, we set vfs_cache_pressure to 1. Despite this configuration, memory pressure conditions can still trigger reclamation of up to 50% of cached dentries, reducing the cache from 20 million to approximately 10 million entries. During the subsequent cache rebuild period, any HDFS datanode restart operation incurs substantial latency penalties until full cache recovery completes. To maintain service stability, we need to preserve more dentries during memory reclamation. The current minimum reclaim ratio (1/100 of total dentries) remains too aggressive for our workload. This patch introduces vfs_cache_pressure_denom for more granular cache pressure control. The configuration [vfs_cache_pressure=1, vfs_cache_pressure_denom=10000] effectively maintains the full 20 million dentry cache under memory pressure, preventing datanode restart performance degradation. Link: https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r1.2.1/hdfs_design.html#NameNode+and+DataNodes [0] Signed-off-by: Yafang Shao Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20250511083624.9305-1-laoar.shao@gmail.com Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner

mm/compaction: reduce the difference between low and high watermarks

2025-05-12T00:48:10+00:00

Reduce the diff between low and high watermarks when compaction proactiveness is set to high. This allows users who set the proactiveness really high to have more stable fragmentation score over time. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250404111103.1994507-3-mclapinski@google.com Signed-off-by: Michal Clapinski Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Vlastimil Babka Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

mm: page_alloc: defrag_mode

2025-03-18T05:07:07+00:00

The page allocator groups requests by migratetype to stave off fragmentation. However, in practice this is routinely defeated by the fact that it gives up *before* invoking reclaim and compaction - which may well produce suitable pages. As a result, fragmentation of physical memory is a common ongoing process in many load scenarios. Fragmentation deteriorates compaction's ability to produce huge pages. Depending on the lifetime of the fragmenting allocations, those effects can be long-lasting or even permanent, requiring drastic measures like forcible idle states or even reboots as the only reliable ways to recover the address space for THP production. In a kernel build test with supplemental THP pressure, the THP allocation rate steadily declines over 15 runs: thp_fault_alloc 61988 56474 57258 50187 52388 55409 52925 47648 43669 40621 36077 41721 36685 34641 33215 This is a hurdle in adopting THP in any environment where hosts are shared between multiple overlapping workloads (cloud environments), and rarely experience true idle periods. To make THP a reliable and predictable optimization, there needs to be a stronger guarantee to avoid such fragmentation. Introduce defrag_mode. When enabled, reclaim/compaction is invoked to its full extent *before* falling back. Specifically, ALLOC_NOFRAGMENT is enforced on the allocator fastpath and the reclaiming slowpath. For now, fallbacks are permitted to avert OOMs. There is a plan to add defrag_mode=2 to prefer OOMs over fragmentation, but this requires additional prep work in compaction and the reserve management to make it ready for all possible allocation contexts. The following test results are from a kernel build with periodic bursts of THP allocations, over 15 runs: vanilla defrag_mode=1 @claimer[unmovable]: 189 103 @claimer[movable]: 92 103 @claimer[reclaimable]: 207 61 @pollute[unmovable from movable]: 25 0 @pollute[unmovable from reclaimable]: 28 0 @pollute[movable from unmovable]: 38835 0 @pollute[movable from reclaimable]: 147136 0 @pollute[reclaimable from unmovable]: 178 0 @pollute[reclaimable from movable]: 33 0 @steal[unmovable from movable]: 11 0 @steal[unmovable from reclaimable]: 5 0 @steal[reclaimable from unmovable]: 107 0 @steal[reclaimable from movable]: 90 0 @steal[movable from reclaimable]: 354 0 @steal[movable from unmovable]: 130 0 Both types of polluting fallbacks are eliminated in this workload. Interestingly, whole block conversions are reduced as well. This is because once a block is claimed for a type, its empty space remains available for future allocations, instead of being padded with fallbacks; this allows the native type to group up instead of spreading out to new blocks. The assumption in the allocator has been that pollution from movable allocations is less harmful than from other types, since they can be reclaimed or migrated out should the space be needed. However, since fallbacks occur *before* reclaim/compaction is invoked, movable pollution will still cause non-movable allocations to spread out and claim more blocks. Without fragmentation, THP rates hold steady with defrag_mode=1: thp_fault_alloc 32478 20725 45045 32130 14018 21711 40791 29134 34458 45381 28305 17265 22584 28454 30850 While the downward trend is eliminated, the keen reader will of course notice that the baseline rate is much smaller than the vanilla kernel's to begin with. This is due to deficiencies in how reclaim and compaction are currently driven: ALLOC_NOFRAGMENT increases the extent to which smaller allocations are competing with THPs for pageblocks, while making no effort themselves to reclaim or compact beyond their own request size. This effect already exists with the current usage of ALLOC_NOFRAGMENT, but is amplified by defrag_mode insisting on whole block stealing much more strongly. Subsequent patches will address defrag_mode reclaim strategy to raise the THP success baseline above the vanilla kernel. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250313210647.1314586-4-hannes@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Vlastimil Babka Cc: Zi Yan Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

docs: mm: add enable_soft_offline sysctl

2024-07-05T01:06:00+00:00

Add the documentation for soft offline behaviors / costs, and what the new enable_soft_offline sysctl is for. [jiaqiyan@google.com: fix kerneldoc warnings] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CACw3F52=GxTCDw-PqFh3-GDM-fo3GbhGdu0hedxYXOTT4TQSTg@mail.gmail.com [jiaqiyan@google.com: there are more blank lines needed] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CACw3F52_obAB742XeDRNun4BHBYtrxtbvp5NkUincXdaob0j1g@mail.gmail.com Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240626050818.2277273-5-jiaqiyan@google.com Signed-off-by: Jiaqi Yan Acked-by: Oscar Salvador Acked-by: Miaohe Lin Acked-by: David Rientjes Cc: Frank van der Linden Cc: Jane Chu Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Lance Yang Cc: Muchun Song Cc: Naoya Horiguchi Cc: Randy Dunlap Cc: Shuah Khan Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

lib: add allocation tagging support for memory allocation profiling

2024-04-26T03:55:52+00:00

Introduce CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING which provides definitions to easily instrument memory allocators. It registers an "alloc_tags" codetag type with /proc/allocinfo interface to output allocation tag information when the feature is enabled. CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_DEBUG is provided for debugging the memory allocation profiling instrumentation. Memory allocation profiling can be enabled or disabled at runtime using /proc/sys/vm/mem_profiling sysctl when CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_DEBUG=n. CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT enables memory allocation profiling by default. [surenb@google.com: Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst: fix allocinfo title] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240326073813.727090-1-surenb@google.com [surenb@google.com: do limited memory accounting for modules with ARCH_NEEDS_WEAK_PER_CPU] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240402180933.1663992-2-surenb@google.com [klarasmodin@gmail.com: explicitly include irqflags.h in alloc_tag.h] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240407133252.173636-1-klarasmodin@gmail.com [surenb@google.com: fix alloc_tag_init() to prevent passing NULL to PTR_ERR()] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240417003349.2520094-1-surenb@google.com Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240321163705.3067592-14-surenb@google.com Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan Co-developed-by: Kent Overstreet Signed-off-by: Kent Overstreet Signed-off-by: Klara Modin Tested-by: Kees Cook Cc: Alexander Viro Cc: Alex Gaynor Cc: Alice Ryhl Cc: Andreas Hindborg Cc: Benno Lossin Cc: "Björn Roy Baron" Cc: Boqun Feng Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Dennis Zhou Cc: Gary Guo Cc: Miguel Ojeda Cc: Pasha Tatashin Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Tejun Heo Cc: Vlastimil Babka Cc: Wedson Almeida Filho Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

docs: mm: fix vm overcommit documentation for OVERCOMMIT_GUESS

2023-10-10T19:35:55+00:00

Commit 8c7829b04c52 "mm: fix false-positive OVERCOMMIT_GUESS failures" changed the behavior of the default OVERCOMMIT_GUESS setting. Reflect the change also in the Documentation, namely files: Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst Documentation/mm/overcommit-accounting.rst Reported-by: Jozef Bacik Signed-off-by: Vratislav Bendel Acked-by: Mike Rapoport Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20220829124638.63748-1-vbendel@redhat.com

Documentation: admin-guide: correct spelling

2023-02-02T18:04:42+00:00

Correct spelling problems for Documentation/admin-guide/ as reported by codespell. Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap Reviewed-by: Mukesh Ojha Cc: Tejun Heo Cc: Zefan Li Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: cgroups@vger.kernel.org Cc: Alasdair Kergon Cc: Mike Snitzer Cc: dm-devel@redhat.com Cc: Mauro Carvalho Chehab Cc: linux-media@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230129231053.20863-2-rdunlap@infradead.org Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

userfaultfd: update documentation to describe /dev/userfaultfd

2022-09-12T03:25:49+00:00

Explain the different ways to create a new userfaultfd, and how access control works for each way. [axelrasmussen@google.com: improve wording in documentation, per Mike] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220819205201.658693-5-axelrasmussen@google.com Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220808175614.3885028-5-axelrasmussen@google.com Signed-off-by: Axel Rasmussen Acked-by: Peter Xu Reviewed-by: Shuah Khan Cc: Al Viro Cc: Dave Hansen Cc: Dmitry V. Levin Cc: Gleb Fotengauer-Malinovskiy Cc: Hugh Dickins Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Mike Kravetz Cc: Mike Rapoport Cc: Nadav Amit Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan Cc: Vlastimil Babka Cc: Zhang Yi Cc: Mike Rapoport Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton