vm.txt: document min_free_pages as critical for correctness
authorPavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 06:31:28 +0000 (23:31 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:43:06 +0000 (08:43 -0700)
min_free_pages is critical for correctness, document it as such.

Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt

index 17346da636e719a13dfa42e170da6aa391909013..b89570c304346f4ddf928996044bcbc7f2e72a72 100644 (file)
@@ -112,6 +112,12 @@ 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.
 
+Some minimal ammount of memory is needed to satisfy PF_MEMALLOC
+allocations; if you set this to lower than 1024KB, your system will
+become subtly broken, and prone to deadlock under high loads.
+
+Setting this too high will OOM your machine instantly.
+
 ==============================================================
 
 percpu_pagelist_fraction