Merge tag 'platform-drivers-x86-v4.11-2' of git://git.infradead.org/linux-platform...

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

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
index f34a8ee6f8606e62d94b12d5dc9a9c6fb82dd36c..6b0ca7feb13573b7a40a9f3c7c145304cf158979 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
@@ -38,6 +38,10 @@ the range for whenever the KSM daemon is started; even if the range
 cannot contain any pages which KSM could actually merge; even if
 MADV_UNMERGEABLE is applied to a range which was never MADV_MERGEABLE.
 
+If a region of memory must be split into at least one new MADV_MERGEABLE
+or MADV_UNMERGEABLE region, the madvise may return ENOMEM if the process
+will exceed vm.max_map_count (see Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt).
+
 Like other madvise calls, they are intended for use on mapped areas of
 the user address space: they will report ENOMEM if the specified range
 includes unmapped gaps (though working on the intervening mapped areas),
@@ -80,6 +84,20 @@ run              - set 0 to stop ksmd from running but keep merged pages,
                    Default: 0 (must be changed to 1 to activate KSM,
                                except if CONFIG_SYSFS is disabled)
 
+use_zero_pages   - specifies whether empty pages (i.e. allocated pages
+                   that only contain zeroes) should be treated specially.
+                   When set to 1, empty pages are merged with the kernel
+                   zero page(s) instead of with each other as it would
+                   happen normally. This can improve the performance on
+                   architectures with coloured zero pages, depending on
+                   the workload. Care should be taken when enabling this
+                   setting, as it can potentially degrade the performance
+                   of KSM for some workloads, for example if the checksums
+                   of pages candidate for merging match the checksum of
+                   an empty page. This setting can be changed at any time,
+                   it is only effective for pages merged after the change.
+                   Default: 0 (normal KSM behaviour as in earlier releases)
+
 The effectiveness of KSM and MADV_MERGEABLE is shown in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/:
 
 pages_shared     - how many shared pages are being used