From 5509a5d27b971a90b940e148ca9ca53312e4fa7a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Dave Hansen Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 14:48:19 -0700 Subject: drop_caches: add some documentation and info message There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and a load of blog posts suggesting that using "drop_caches" periodically keeps your system running in "tip top shape". Perhaps adding some kernel documentation will increase the amount of accurate data on its use. If we are not shrinking caches effectively, then we have real bugs. Using drop_caches will simply mask the bugs and make them harder to find, but certainly does not fix them, nor is it an appropriate "workaround" to limit the size of the caches. On the contrary, there have been bug reports on issues that turned out to be misguided use of cache dropping. Dropping caches is a very drastic and disruptive operation that is good for debugging and running tests, but if it creates bug reports from production use, kernel developers should be aware of its use. Add a bit more documentation about it, a syslog message to track down abusers, and vmstat drop counters to help analyze problem reports. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: checkpatch fixes] [hannes@cmpxchg.org: add runtime suppression control] Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- kernel/sysctl.c | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) (limited to 'kernel/sysctl.c') diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c index 09d2e2413605..5c14b547882e 100644 --- a/kernel/sysctl.c +++ b/kernel/sysctl.c @@ -123,7 +123,7 @@ static int __maybe_unused neg_one = -1; static int zero; static int __maybe_unused one = 1; static int __maybe_unused two = 2; -static int __maybe_unused three = 3; +static int __maybe_unused four = 4; static unsigned long one_ul = 1; static int one_hundred = 100; #ifdef CONFIG_PRINTK @@ -1264,7 +1264,7 @@ static struct ctl_table vm_table[] = { .mode = 0644, .proc_handler = drop_caches_sysctl_handler, .extra1 = &one, - .extra2 = &three, + .extra2 = &four, }, #ifdef CONFIG_COMPACTION { -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151