mm: prepare to remove /proc/sys/vm/hugepages_treat_as_movable

[karo-tx-linux.git] / Documentation / sysctl / vm.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 36ecc26c74339519ce69c0138e88fb1ad3155010..79a797eb3e879ac2aac45e546c62bd504404e2eb 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -200,17 +200,25 @@ fragmentation index is <= extfrag_threshold. The default value is 500.
 
 hugepages_treat_as_movable
 
-This parameter is only useful when kernelcore= is specified at boot time to
-create ZONE_MOVABLE for pages that may be reclaimed or migrated. Huge pages
-are not movable so are not normally allocated from ZONE_MOVABLE. A non-zero
-value written to hugepages_treat_as_movable allows huge pages to be allocated
-from ZONE_MOVABLE.
-
-Once enabled, the ZONE_MOVABLE is treated as an area of memory the huge
-pages pool can easily grow or shrink within. Assuming that applications are
-not running that mlock() a lot of memory, it is likely the huge pages pool
-can grow to the size of ZONE_MOVABLE by repeatedly entering the desired value
-into nr_hugepages and triggering page reclaim.
+This parameter controls whether we can allocate hugepages from ZONE_MOVABLE
+or not. If set to non-zero, hugepages can be allocated from ZONE_MOVABLE.
+ZONE_MOVABLE is created when kernel boot parameter kernelcore= is specified,
+so this parameter has no effect if used without kernelcore=.
+
+Hugepage migration is now available in some situations which depend on the
+architecture and/or the hugepage size. If a hugepage supports migration,
+allocation from ZONE_MOVABLE is always enabled for the hugepage regardless
+of the value of this parameter.
+IOW, this parameter affects only non-migratable hugepages.
+
+Assuming that hugepages are not migratable in your system, one usecase of
+this parameter is that users can make hugepage pool more extensible by
+enabling the allocation from ZONE_MOVABLE. This is because on ZONE_MOVABLE
+page reclaim/migration/compaction work more and you can get contiguous
+memory more likely. Note that using ZONE_MOVABLE for non-migratable
+hugepages can do harm to other features like memory hotremove (because
+memory hotremove expects that memory blocks on ZONE_MOVABLE are always
+removable,) so it's a trade-off responsible for the users.
 
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