From 52b6f46bc163eef17ecba4cd552beeafe2b24453 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Hugh Dickins Date: Thu, 19 May 2016 17:12:50 -0700 Subject: mm: /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force vmstat update Provide /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force an immediate update of per-cpu into global vmstats: useful to avoid a sleep(2) or whatever before checking counts when testing. Originally added to work around a bug which left counts stranded indefinitely on a cpu going idle (an inaccuracy magnified when small below-batch numbers represent "huge" amounts of memory), but I believe that bug is now fixed: nonetheless, this is still a useful knob. Its schedule_on_each_cpu() is probably too expensive just to fold into reading /proc/meminfo itself: give this mode 0600 to prevent abuse. Allow a write or a read to do the same: nothing to read, but "grep -h Shmem /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh /proc/meminfo" is convenient. Oh, and since global_page_state() itself is careful to disguise any underflow as 0, hack in an "Invalid argument" and pr_warn() if a counter is negative after the refresh - this helped to fix a misaccounting of NR_ISOLATED_FILE in my migration code. But on recent kernels, I find that NR_ALLOC_BATCH and NR_PAGES_SCANNED often go negative some of the time. I have not yet worked out why, but have no evidence that it's actually harmful. Punt for the moment by just ignoring the anomaly on those. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" Cc: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla Cc: Yang Shi Cc: Ning Qu Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt | 14 ++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl') diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt index 34a5fece3121..720355cbdf45 100644 --- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt +++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt @@ -57,6 +57,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm: - panic_on_oom - percpu_pagelist_fraction - stat_interval +- stat_refresh - swappiness - user_reserve_kbytes - vfs_cache_pressure @@ -755,6 +756,19 @@ 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.) + +============================================================== + swappiness This control is used to define how aggressive the kernel will swap -- cgit