linux-kernel - [PATCH] mm: document highmem_is

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Date:   Mon, 26 Jun 2017 11:32:00 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>, Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        <linux-mm@...ck.org>, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg@...il.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
Subject: [PATCH] mm: document highmem_is_dirtyable sysctl

From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>

It seems that there are still people using 32b kernels which a lot of
memory and the IO tend to suck a lot for them by default. Mostly because
writers are throttled too when the lowmem is used. We have
highmem_is_dirtyable to work around that issue but it seems we never
bothered to document it. Let's do it now, finally.

Cc: Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg@...il.com>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
---
Hi,
JFYI this came out from recent discussion [1].

[1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170622123736.1d80f1318eac41cd661b7757@linux-foundation.org

 Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index b4ad97f10b8e..48244c42ff52 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -240,6 +240,26 @@ 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.
+
+==============================================================
+
 hugepages_treat_as_movable
 
 This parameter controls whether we can allocate hugepages from ZONE_MOVABLE
-- 
2.11.0