mm: add extra free kbytes tunable

mm: add extra free kbytes tunable

Add a userspace visible knob to tell the VM to keep an extra amount of
memory free, by increasing the gap between each zone's min and low
watermarks.

This is useful for realtime applications that call system calls and have a
bound on the number of allocations that happen in any short time period.
In this application, extra_free_kbytes would be left at an amount equal to
or larger than than the maximum number of allocations that happen in any
burst.

It may also be useful to reduce the memory use of virtual machines
(temporarily?), in a way that does not cause memory fragmentation like
ballooning does.

Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <>