Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6

[sfrench/cifs-2.6.git] / Documentation / sysctl / vm.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index b4ad97f10b8e6963878f64ff4828ca7ea56a4316..48244c42ff5214176cf4dfc071f803e2aa8cd71f 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -240,6 +240,26 @@ fragmentation index is <= extfrag_threshold. The default value is 500.
 
 ==============================================================
 
+highmem_is_dirtyable
+
+Available only for systems with CONFIG_HIGHMEM enabled (32b systems).
+
+This parameter controls whether the high memory is considered for dirty
+writers throttling.  This is not the case by default which means that
+only the amount of memory directly visible/usable by the kernel can
+be dirtied. As a result, on systems with a large amount of memory and
+lowmem basically depleted writers might be throttled too early and
+streaming writes can get very slow.
+
+Changing the value to non zero would allow more memory to be dirtied
+and thus allow writers to write more data which can be flushed to the
+storage more effectively. Note this also comes with a risk of pre-mature
+OOM killer because some writers (e.g. direct block device writes) can
+only use the low memory and they can fill it up with dirty data without
+any throttling.
+
+==============================================================
+
 hugepages_treat_as_movable
 
 This parameter controls whether we can allocate hugepages from ZONE_MOVABLE