linux-toradex.git/Documentation/sysctl, branch tegra-10.9.7

Merge branch 'hwpoison' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-mce-2.6

2009-09-24T14:53:22+00:00

* 'hwpoison' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-mce-2.6: (21 commits)
  HWPOISON: Enable error_remove_page on btrfs
  HWPOISON: Add simple debugfs interface to inject hwpoison on arbitary PFNs
  HWPOISON: Add madvise() based injector for hardware poisoned pages v4
  HWPOISON: Enable error_remove_page for NFS
  HWPOISON: Enable .remove_error_page for migration aware file systems
  HWPOISON: The high level memory error handler in the VM v7
  HWPOISON: Add PR_MCE_KILL prctl to control early kill behaviour per process
  HWPOISON: shmem: call set_page_dirty() with locked page
  HWPOISON: Define a new error_remove_page address space op for async truncation
  HWPOISON: Add invalidate_inode_page
  HWPOISON: Refactor truncate to allow direct truncating of page v2
  HWPOISON: check and isolate corrupted free pages v2
  HWPOISON: Handle hardware poisoned pages in try_to_unmap
  HWPOISON: Use bitmask/action code for try_to_unmap behaviour
  HWPOISON: x86: Add VM_FAULT_HWPOISON handling to x86 page fault handler v2
  HWPOISON: Add poison check to page fault handling
  HWPOISON: Add basic support for poisoned pages in fault handler v3
  HWPOISON: Add new SIGBUS error codes for hardware poison signals
  HWPOISON: Add support for poison swap entries v2
  HWPOISON: Export some rmap vma locking to outside world
  ...

exec: let do_coredump() limit the number of concurrent dumps to pipes

2009-09-24T14:21:00+00:00

Introduce core pipe limiting sysctl.

Since we can dump cores to pipe, rather than directly to the filesystem,
we create a condition in which a user can create a very high load on the
system simply by running bad applications.

If the pipe reader specified in core_pattern is poorly written, we can
have lots of ourstandig resources and processes in the system.

This sysctl introduces an ability to limit that resource consumption.
core_pipe_limit defines how many in-flight dumps may be run in parallel,
dumps beyond this value are skipped and a note is made in the kernel log.
A special value of 0 in core_pipe_limit denotes unlimited core dumps may
be handled (this is the default value).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Neil Horman 
Reported-by: Earl Chew 
Cc: Oleg Nesterov 
Cc: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Alan Cox 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation: update stale definition of file-nr in fs.txt

2009-09-24T14:20:57+00:00

In "documentation: update Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt and
Documentation/sysctls" (commit 760df93ec) we merged /proc/sys/fs
documentation in Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt and
Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt, but stale file-nr definition
remained.

This patch adds back the right fs-nr definition for 2.6 kernel.

Signed-off-by: Xiaotian Feng
Cc: Randy Dunlap 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

printk: add printk_delay to make messages readable for some scenarios

2009-09-23T14:39:28+00:00

When syslog is not possible, at the same time there's no serial/net
console available, it will be hard to read the printk messages.  For
example oops/panic/warning messages in shutdown phase.

Add a printk delay feature, we can make each printk message delay some
milliseconds.

Setting the delay by proc/sysctl interface: /proc/sys/kernel/printk_delay

The value range from 0 - 10000, default value is 0

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix a few things]
Signed-off-by: Dave Young 
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial

2009-09-22T14:51:45+00:00

* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial: (34 commits)
  trivial: fix typo in aic7xxx comment
  trivial: fix comment typo in drivers/ata/pata_hpt37x.c
  trivial: typo in kernel-parameters.txt
  trivial: fix typo in tracing documentation
  trivial: add __init/__exit macros in drivers/gpio/bt8xxgpio.c
  trivial: add __init macro/ fix of __exit macro location in ipmi_poweroff.c
  trivial: remove unnecessary semicolons
  trivial: Fix duplicated word "options" in comment
  trivial: kbuild: remove extraneous blank line after declaration of usage()
  trivial: improve help text for mm debug config options
  trivial: doc: hpfall: accept disk device to unload as argument
  trivial: doc: hpfall: reduce risk that hpfall can do harm
  trivial: SubmittingPatches: Fix reference to renumbered step
  trivial: fix typos "man[ae]g?ment" -> "management"
  trivial: media/video/cx88: add __init/__exit macros to cx88 drivers
  trivial: fix typo in CONFIG_DEBUG_FS in gcov doc
  trivial: fix missing printk space in amd_k7_smp_check
  trivial: fix typo s/ketymap/keymap/ in comment
  trivial: fix typo "to to" in multiple files
  trivial: fix typos in comments s/DGBU/DBGU/
  ...

vm: document that setting vfs_cache_pressure to 0 isn't a good idea

2009-09-22T14:17:30+00:00

Reported-by: Christian Thaeter 
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

trivial: doc: document missing value 2 for randomize-va-space

2009-09-21T13:14:53+00:00

The documentation for /proc/sys/kernel/* does not mention the possible
value 2 for randomize-va-space yet.  While being there, doing some
reformatting, fixing grammar problems and clarifying the correlations
between randomize-va-space, kernel parameter "norandmaps" and the
CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK option.

Signed-off-by: Horst Schirmeier 
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina

HWPOISON: The high level memory error handler in the VM v7

2009-09-16T09:50:15+00:00

Add the high level memory handler that poisons pages
that got corrupted by hardware (typically by a two bit flip in a DIMM
or a cache) on the Linux level. The goal is to prevent everyone
from accessing these pages in the future.

This done at the VM level by marking a page hwpoisoned
and doing the appropriate action based on the type of page
it is.

The code that does this is portable and lives in mm/memory-failure.c

To quote the overview comment:

High level machine check handler. Handles pages reported by the
hardware as being corrupted usually due to a 2bit ECC memory or cache
failure.

This focuses on pages detected as corrupted in the background.
When the current CPU tries to consume corruption the currently
running process can just be killed directly instead. This implies
that if the error cannot be handled for some reason it's safe to
just ignore it because no corruption has been consumed yet. Instead
when that happens another machine check will happen.

Handles page cache pages in various states. The tricky part
here is that we can access any page asynchronous to other VM
users, because memory failures could happen anytime and anywhere,
possibly violating some of their assumptions. This is why this code
has to be extremely careful. Generally it tries to use normal locking
rules, as in get the standard locks, even if that means the
error handling takes potentially a long time.

Some of the operations here are somewhat inefficient and have non
linear algorithmic complexity, because the data structures have not
been optimized for this case. This is in particular the case
for the mapping from a vma to a process. Since this case is expected
to be rare we hope we can get away with this.

There are in principle two strategies to kill processes on poison:
- just unmap the data and wait for an actual reference before
killing
- kill as soon as corruption is detected.
Both have advantages and disadvantages and should be used
in different situations. Right now both are implemented and can
be switched with a new sysctl vm.memory_failure_early_kill
The default is early kill.

The patch does some rmap data structure walking on its own to collect
processes to kill. This is unusual because normally all rmap data structure
knowledge is in rmap.c only. I put it here for now to keep
everything together and rmap knowledge has been seeping out anyways

Includes contributions from Johannes Weiner, Chris Mason, Fengguang Wu,
Nick Piggin (who did a lot of great work) and others.

Cc: npiggin@suse.de
Cc: riel@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Reviewed-by: Hidehiro Kawai

[S390] add call home support

2009-09-11T08:29:49+00:00

Signed-off-by: Hans-Joachim Picht 
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky

vmscan: properly account for the number of page cache pages zone_reclaim() can reclaim

2009-06-17T02:47:45+00:00

A bug was brought to my attention against a distro kernel but it affects
mainline and I believe problems like this have been reported in various
guises on the mailing lists although I don't have specific examples at the
moment.

The reported problem was that malloc() stalled for a long time (minutes in
some cases) if a large tmpfs mount was occupying a large percentage of
memory overall.  The pages did not get cleaned or reclaimed by
zone_reclaim() because the zone_reclaim_mode was unsuitable, but the lists
are uselessly scanned frequencly making the CPU spin at near 100%.

This patchset intends to address that bug and bring the behaviour of
zone_reclaim() more in line with expectations which were noticed during
investigation.  It is based on top of mmotm and takes advantage of
Kosaki's work with respect to zone_reclaim().

Patch 1 fixes the heuristics that zone_reclaim() uses to determine if the
	scan should go ahead. The broken heuristic is what was causing the
	malloc() stall as it uselessly scanned the LRU constantly. Currently,
	zone_reclaim is assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 and historically it
	could not deal with tmpfs pages at all. This fixes up the heuristic so
	that an unnecessary scan is more likely to be correctly avoided.

Patch 2 notes that zone_reclaim() returning a failure automatically means
	the zone is marked full. This is not always true. It could have
	failed because the GFP mask or zone_reclaim_mode were unsuitable.

Patch 3 introduces a counter zreclaim_failed that will increment each
	time the zone_reclaim scan-avoidance heuristics fail. If that
	counter is rapidly increasing, then zone_reclaim_mode should be
	set to 0 as a temporarily resolution and a bug reported because
	the scan-avoidance heuristic is still broken.

This patch:

On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that
is a more targetted form of direct reclaim.  On machines with large NUMA
distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that
clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not
being met.

There is a heuristic that determines if the scan is worthwhile but the
problem is that the heuristic is not being properly applied and is
basically assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 if it is enabled.  The lack of
proper detection can manfiest as high CPU usage as the LRU list is scanned
uselessly.

Historically, once enabled it was depending on NR_FILE_PAGES which may
include swapcache pages that the reclaim_mode cannot deal with.  Patch
vmscan-change-the-number-of-the-unmapped-files-in-zone-reclaim.patch by
Kosaki Motohiro noted that zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES) included
pages that were not file-backed such as swapcache and made a calculation
based on the inactive, active and mapped files.  This is far superior when
zone_reclaim==1 but if RECLAIM_SWAP is set, then NR_FILE_PAGES is a
reasonable starting figure.

This patch alters how zone_reclaim() works out how many pages it might be
able to reclaim given the current reclaim_mode.  If RECLAIM_SWAP is set in
the reclaim_mode it will either consider NR_FILE_PAGES as potential
candidates or else use NR_{IN}ACTIVE}_PAGES-NR_FILE_MAPPED to discount
swapcache and other non-file-backed pages.  If RECLAIM_WRITE is not set,
then NR_FILE_DIRTY number of pages are not candidates.  If RECLAIM_SWAP is
not set, then NR_FILE_MAPPED are not.

[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: Estimate unmapped pages minus tmpfs pages]
[fengguang.wu@intel.com: Fix underflow problem in Kosaki's estimate]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds