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-rw-r--r--Documentation/vm/ksm.txt18
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
index f34a8ee6f860..6b0ca7feb135 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
@@ -38,6 +38,10 @@ the range for whenever the KSM daemon is started; even if the range
cannot contain any pages which KSM could actually merge; even if
MADV_UNMERGEABLE is applied to a range which was never MADV_MERGEABLE.
+If a region of memory must be split into at least one new MADV_MERGEABLE
+or MADV_UNMERGEABLE region, the madvise may return ENOMEM if the process
+will exceed vm.max_map_count (see Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt).
+
Like other madvise calls, they are intended for use on mapped areas of
the user address space: they will report ENOMEM if the specified range
includes unmapped gaps (though working on the intervening mapped areas),
@@ -80,6 +84,20 @@ run - set 0 to stop ksmd from running but keep merged pages,
Default: 0 (must be changed to 1 to activate KSM,
except if CONFIG_SYSFS is disabled)
+use_zero_pages - specifies whether empty pages (i.e. allocated pages
+ that only contain zeroes) should be treated specially.
+ When set to 1, empty pages are merged with the kernel
+ zero page(s) instead of with each other as it would
+ happen normally. This can improve the performance on
+ architectures with coloured zero pages, depending on
+ the workload. Care should be taken when enabling this
+ setting, as it can potentially degrade the performance
+ of KSM for some workloads, for example if the checksums
+ of pages candidate for merging match the checksum of
+ an empty page. This setting can be changed at any time,
+ it is only effective for pages merged after the change.
+ Default: 0 (normal KSM behaviour as in earlier releases)
+
The effectiveness of KSM and MADV_MERGEABLE is shown in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/:
pages_shared - how many shared pages are being used