[PATCH] Make high and batch sizes of per_cpu_pagelists configurable

As recently there has been lot of traffic on the right values for batch and
high water marks for per_cpu_pagelists.  This patch makes these two
variables configurable through /proc interface.

A new tunable /proc/sys/vm/percpu_pagelist_fraction is added.  This entry
controls the fraction of pages at most in each zone that are allocated for
each per cpu page list.  The min value for this is 8.  It means that we
don't allow more than 1/8th of pages in each zone to be allocated in any
single per_cpu_pagelist.

The batch value of each per cpu pagelist is also updated as a result.  It
is set to pcp->high/4.  The upper limit of batch is (PAGE_SHIFT * 8)

Signed-off-by: Rohit Seth <rohit.seth@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 89ba1a42a17d..6910c0136f8d 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -103,3 +103,20 @@ This is used to force the Linux VM to keep a minimum number
 of kilobytes free.  The VM uses this number to compute a pages_min
 value for each lowmem zone in the system.  Each lowmem zone gets 
 a number of reserved free pages based proportionally on its size.
+
+==============================================================
+
+percpu_pagelist_fraction
+
+This is the fraction of pages at most (high mark pcp->high) in each zone that
+are allocated for each per cpu page list.  The min value for this is 8.  It
+means that we don't allow more than 1/8th of pages in each zone to be
+allocated in any single per_cpu_pagelist.  This entry only changes the value
+of hot per cpu pagelists.  User can specify a number like 100 to allocate
+1/100th of each zone to each per cpu page list.
+
+The batch value of each per cpu pagelist is also updated as a result.  It is
+set to pcp->high/4.  The upper limit of batch is (PAGE_SHIFT * 8)
+
+The initial value is zero.  Kernel does not use this value at boot time to set
+the high water marks for each per cpu page list.