[PATCH v3 1/1] mm/ksm: documentation for coloured zero pages deduplication

From: Claudio Imbrenda
Date: Fri Jan 20 2017 - 10:52:17 EST


This patch adds the needed documentation for the use_zero_pages property.

Signed-off-by: Claudio Imbrenda <imbrenda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/vm/ksm.txt | 14 ++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 14 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
index f34a8ee..0c64a81d 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
@@ -80,6 +80,20 @@ run - set 0 to stop ksmd from running but keep merged pages,
Default: 0 (must be changed to 1 to activate KSM,
except if CONFIG_SYSFS is disabled)

+use_zero_pages - specifies whether empty pages (i.e. allocated pages
+ that only contain zeroes) should be treated specially.
+ When set to 1, empty pages are merged with the kernel
+ zero page(s) instead of with each other as it would
+ happen normally. This can improve the performance on
+ architectures with coloured zero pages, depending on
+ the workload. Care should be taken when enabling this
+ setting, as it can potentially degrade the performance
+ of KSM for some workloads, for example if the checksums
+ of pages candidate for merging match the checksum of
+ an empty page. This setting can be changed at any time,
+ it is only effective for pages merged after the change.
+ Default: 0 (normal KSM behaviour as in earlier releases)
+
The effectiveness of KSM and MADV_MERGEABLE is shown in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/:

pages_shared - how many shared pages are being used
--
1.9.1