mm: add overcommit_kbytes sysctl variable

Some applications that run on HPC clusters are designed around the
availability of RAM and the overcommit ratio is fine tuned to get the
maximum usage of memory without swapping.  With growing memory, the
1%-of-all-RAM grain provided by overcommit_ratio has become too coarse
for these workload (on a 2TB machine it represents no less than 20GB).

This patch adds the new overcommit_kbytes sysctl variable that allow a
much finer grain.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix nommu build]
Signed-off-by: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 1fbd4eb7b64a..9f5481bdc5a4 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -47,6 +47,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
 - numa_zonelist_order
 - oom_dump_tasks
 - oom_kill_allocating_task
+- overcommit_kbytes
 - overcommit_memory
 - overcommit_ratio
 - page-cluster
@@ -574,6 +575,17 @@ The default value is 0.
 
 ==============================================================
 
+overcommit_kbytes:
+
+When overcommit_memory is set to 2, the committed address space is not
+permitted to exceed swap plus this amount of physical RAM. See below.
+
+Note: overcommit_kbytes is the counterpart of overcommit_ratio. Only one
+of them may be specified at a time. Setting one disables the other (which
+then appears as 0 when read).
+
+==============================================================
+
 overcommit_memory:
 
 This value contains a flag that enables memory overcommitment.