linux/Documentation/sysctl
Waiman Long af0c9af1b3 fs/dcache: Track & report number of negative dentries
The current dentry number tracking code doesn't distinguish between
positive & negative dentries.  It just reports the total number of
dentries in the LRU lists.

As excessive number of negative dentries can have an impact on system
performance, it will be wise to track the number of positive and
negative dentries separately.

This patch adds tracking for the total number of negative dentries in
the system LRU lists and reports it in the 5th field in the
/proc/sys/fs/dentry-state file.  The number, however, does not include
negative dentries that are in flight but not in the LRU yet as well as
those in the shrinker lists which are on the way out anyway.

The number of positive dentries in the LRU lists can be roughly found by
subtracting the number of negative dentries from the unused count.

Matthew Wilcox had confirmed that since the introduction of the
dentry_stat structure in 2.1.60, the dummy array was there, probably for
future extension.  They were not replacements of pre-existing fields.
So no sane applications that read the value of /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state
will do dummy thing if the last 2 fields of the sysctl parameter are not
zero.  IOW, it will be safe to use one of the dummy array entry for
negative dentry count.

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2019-01-30 11:02:11 -08:00
..
README docs: Update binfmt_misc links 2017-10-03 15:23:38 -06:00
abi.txt
fs.txt fs/dcache: Track & report number of negative dentries 2019-01-30 11:02:11 -08:00
kernel.txt kernel/sysctl: add panic_print into sysctl 2019-01-04 13:13:47 -08:00
net.txt bpf: add bpf_jit_limit knob to restrict unpriv allocations 2018-10-25 17:11:42 -07:00
sunrpc.txt
user.txt Documentation/sysctl/user.txt: fix typo 2018-02-06 18:32:48 -08:00
vm.txt mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs 2018-12-28 12:11:48 -08:00

README

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/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst>
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
user/		Per user per user namespace limits

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 :-)