docs/vm: rename documentation files to .rst

Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>

1 files changed, 87 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..0dd54bbe4afa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
+.. _overcommit_accounting:
+
+=====================
+Overcommit Accounting
+=====================
+
+The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes
+
+0
+	Heuristic overcommit handling. Obvious overcommits of address
+	space are refused. Used for a typical system. It ensures a
+	seriously wild allocation fails while allowing overcommit to
+	reduce swap usage.  root is allowed to allocate slightly more
+	memory in this mode. This is the default.
+
+1
+	Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific
+	applications. Classic example is code using sparse arrays and
+	just relying on the virtual memory consisting almost entirely
+	of zero pages.
+
+2
+	Don't overcommit. The total address space commit for the
+	system is not permitted to exceed swap + a configurable amount
+	(default is 50%) of physical RAM.  Depending on the amount you
+	use, in most situations this means a process will not be
+	killed while accessing pages but will receive errors on memory
+	allocation as appropriate.
+
+	Useful for applications that want to guarantee their memory
+	allocations will be available in the future without having to
+	initialize every page.
+
+The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl ``vm.overcommit_memory``.
+
+The overcommit amount can be set via ``vm.overcommit_ratio`` (percentage)
+or ``vm.overcommit_kbytes`` (absolute value).
+
+The current overcommit limit and amount committed are viewable in
+``/proc/meminfo`` as CommitLimit and Committed_AS respectively.
+
+Gotchas
+=======
+
+The C language stack growth does an implicit mremap. If you want absolute
+guarantees and run close to the edge you MUST mmap your stack for the
+largest size you think you will need. For typical stack usage this does
+not matter much but it's a corner case if you really really care
+
+In mode 2 the MAP_NORESERVE flag is ignored.
+
+
+How It Works
+============
+
+The overcommit is based on the following rules
+
+For a file backed map
+	| SHARED or READ-only	-	0 cost (the file is the map not swap)
+	| PRIVATE WRITABLE	-	size of mapping per instance
+
+For an anonymous or ``/dev/zero`` map
+	| SHARED			-	size of mapping
+	| PRIVATE READ-only	-	0 cost (but of little use)
+	| PRIVATE WRITABLE	-	size of mapping per instance
+
+Additional accounting
+	| Pages made writable copies by mmap
+	| shmfs memory drawn from the same pool
+
+Status
+======
+
+*	We account mmap memory mappings
+*	We account mprotect changes in commit
+*	We account mremap changes in size
+*	We account brk
+*	We account munmap
+*	We report the commit status in /proc
+*	Account and check on fork
+*	Review stack handling/building on exec
+*	SHMfs accounting
+*	Implement actual limit enforcement
+
+To Do
+=====
+*	Account ptrace pages (this is hard)