TTY, devpts: document pty count limiting

Logic has been changed in kernel 3.4 by commit e9aba5158a80
("tty: rework pty count limiting") but still not documented.

Sysctl kernel.pty.max works as global limit, kernel.pty.reserve ptys
are reserved for initial devpts instance (mounted without "newinstance").
Per-instance limit also could be set by mount option "max=%d".

Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@yandex-team.ru>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt
index 68dffd87f9b7..30d2fcb32f72 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt
@@ -51,6 +51,15 @@ where 'ns_exec -cm /bin/bash' calls clone() with CLONE_NEWNS flag and execs
 /bin/bash in the child process.  A pty created by the sshd is not visible in
 the original mount of /dev/pts.
 
+Total count of pty pairs in all instances is limited by sysctls:
+kernel.pty.max = 4096           - global limit
+kernel.pty.reserve = 1024       - reserve for initial instance
+kernel.pty.nr                   - current count of ptys
+
+Per-instance limit could be set by adding mount option "max=<count>".
+This feature was added in kernel 3.4 together with sysctl kernel.pty.reserve.
+In kernels older than 3.4 sysctl kernel.pty.max works as per-instance limit.
+
 User-space changes
 ------------------