vm.txt: document min_free_pages as critical for correctness

24950898 · Pavel Machek <[email protected]> · 2007-10-16 23:31:28 -07:00

min_free_pages is critical for correctness, document it as such.

Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

Commit: 24950898ffd161f2ea67c60f398146457bca8bf0
Parents: f4e87570

Changes

1 files changed · +6 −0

File	Status	Add	Del	Content
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt	modified	+6	−0	View file

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt

View file

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 17346da..b89570c 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -112,6 +112,12 @@ of kilobytes free.  The VM uses this number to compute a pages_min
 value for each lowmem zone in the system.  Each lowmem zone gets 
 a number of reserved free pages based proportionally on its size.
 
+Some minimal ammount of memory is needed to satisfy PF_MEMALLOC
+allocations; if you set this to lower than 1024KB, your system will
+become subtly broken, and prone to deadlock under high loads.
+
+Setting this too high will OOM your machine instantly.
+
 ==============================================================
 
 percpu_pagelist_fraction