linux/Documentation/sysctl
Linus Torvalds 875fc4f5dd Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew)
Merge first patch-bomb from Andrew Morton:

 - A few hotfixes which missed 4.4 becasue I was asleep.  cc'ed to
   -stable

 - A few misc fixes

 - OCFS2 updates

 - Part of MM.  Including pretty large changes to page-flags handling
   and to thp management which have been buffered up for 2-3 cycles now.

  I have a lot of MM material this time.

[ It turns out the THP part wasn't quite ready, so that got dropped from
  this series  - Linus ]

* emailed patches from Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>: (117 commits)
  zsmalloc: reorganize struct size_class to pack 4 bytes hole
  mm/zbud.c: use list_last_entry() instead of list_tail_entry()
  zram/zcomp: do not zero out zcomp private pages
  zram: pass gfp from zcomp frontend to backend
  zram: try vmalloc() after kmalloc()
  zram/zcomp: use GFP_NOIO to allocate streams
  mm: add tracepoint for scanning pages
  drivers/base/memory.c: fix kernel warning during memory hotplug on ppc64
  mm/page_isolation: use macro to judge the alignment
  mm: fix noisy sparse warning in LIBCFS_ALLOC_PRE()
  mm: rework virtual memory accounting
  include/linux/memblock.h: fix ordering of 'flags' argument in comments
  mm: move lru_to_page to mm_inline.h
  Documentation/filesystems: describe the shared memory usage/accounting
  memory-hotplug: don't BUG() in register_memory_resource()
  hugetlb: make mm and fs code explicitly non-modular
  mm/swapfile.c: use list_for_each_entry_safe in free_swap_count_continuations
  mm: /proc/pid/clear_refs: no need to clear VM_SOFTDIRTY in clear_soft_dirty_pmd()
  mm: make sure isolate_lru_page() is never called for tail page
  vmstat: make vmstat_updater deferrable again and shut down on idle
  ...
2016-01-15 11:41:44 -08:00
..
00-INDEX sysctl: remove obsolete comments 2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
abi.txt
fs.txt Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2012-08-01 10:26:23 -07:00
kernel.txt Documentation: Document kernel.panic_on_io_nmi sysctl 2015-12-19 11:07:01 +01:00
net.txt net: qdisc: enhance default_qdisc documentation 2015-09-17 16:09:22 -07:00
README
sunrpc.txt
vm.txt Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2016-01-15 11:41:44 -08:00

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/binfmt_misc.txt>
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

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 :-)