linux/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst, branch v7.0

Merge tag 'mm-stable-2026-02-11-19-22' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm

2026-02-12T19:32:37Z

Pull MM updates from Andrew Morton: - "powerpc/64s: do not re-activate batched TLB flush" makes arch_{enter|leave}_lazy_mmu_mode() nest properly (Alexander Gordeev) It adds a generic enter/leave layer and switches architectures to use it. Various hacks were removed in the process. - "zram: introduce compressed data writeback" implements data compression for zram writeback (Richard Chang and Sergey Senozhatsky) - "mm: folio_zero_user: clear page ranges" adds clearing of contiguous page ranges for hugepages. Large improvements during demand faulting are demonstrated (David Hildenbrand) - "memcg cleanups" tidies up some memcg code (Chen Ridong) - "mm/damon: introduce {,max_}nr_snapshots and tracepoint for damos stats" improves DAMOS stat's provided information, deterministic control, and readability (SeongJae Park) - "selftests/mm: hugetlb cgroup charging: robustness fixes" fixes a few issues in the hugetlb cgroup charging selftests (Li Wang) - "Fix va_high_addr_switch.sh test failure - again" addresses several issues in the va_high_addr_switch test (Chunyu Hu) - "mm/damon/tests/core-kunit: extend existing test scenarios" improves the KUnit test coverage for DAMON (Shu Anzai) - "mm/khugepaged: fix dirty page handling for MADV_COLLAPSE" fixes a glitch in khugepaged which was causing madvise(MADV_COLLAPSE) to transiently return -EAGAIN (Shivank Garg) - "arch, mm: consolidate hugetlb early reservation" reworks and consolidates a pile of straggly code related to reservation of hugetlb memory from bootmem and creation of CMA areas for hugetlb (Mike Rapoport) - "mm: clean up anon_vma implementation" cleans up the anon_vma implementation in various ways (Lorenzo Stoakes) - "tweaks for __alloc_pages_slowpath()" does a little streamlining of the page allocator's slowpath code (Vlastimil Babka) - "memcg: separate private and public ID namespaces" cleans up the memcg ID code and prevents the internal-only private IDs from being exposed to userspace (Shakeel Butt) - "mm: hugetlb: allocate frozen gigantic folio" cleans up the allocation of frozen folios and avoids some atomic refcount operations (Kefeng Wang) - "mm/damon: advance DAMOS-based LRU sorting" improves DAMOS's movement of memory betewwn the active and inactive LRUs and adds auto-tuning of the ratio-based quotas and of monitoring intervals (SeongJae Park) - "Support page table check on PowerPC" makes CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_CHECK_ENFORCED work on powerpc (Andrew Donnellan) - "nodemask: align nodes_and{,not} with underlying bitmap ops" makes nodes_and() and nodes_andnot() propagate the return values from the underlying bit operations, enabling some cleanup in calling code (Yury Norov) - "mm/damon: hide kdamond and kdamond_lock from API callers" cleans up some DAMON internal interfaces (SeongJae Park) - "mm/khugepaged: cleanups and scan limit fix" does some cleanup work in khupaged and fixes a scan limit accounting issue (Shivank Garg) - "mm: balloon infrastructure cleanups" goes to town on the balloon infrastructure and its page migration function. Mainly cleanups, also some locking simplification (David Hildenbrand) - "mm/vmscan: add tracepoint and reason for kswapd_failures reset" adds additional tracepoints to the page reclaim code (Jiayuan Chen) - "Replace wq users and add WQ_PERCPU to alloc_workqueue() users" is part of Marco's kernel-wide migration from the legacy workqueue APIs over to the preferred unbound workqueues (Marco Crivellari) - "Various mm kselftests improvements/fixes" provides various unrelated improvements/fixes for the mm kselftests (Kevin Brodsky) - "mm: accelerate gigantic folio allocation" greatly speeds up gigantic folio allocation, mainly by avoiding unnecessary work in pfn_range_valid_contig() (Kefeng Wang) - "selftests/damon: improve leak detection and wss estimation reliability" improves the reliability of two of the DAMON selftests (SeongJae Park) - "mm/damon: cleanup kdamond, damon_call(), damos filter and DAMON_MIN_REGION" does some cleanup work in the core DAMON code (SeongJae Park) - "Docs/mm/damon: update intro, modules, maintainer profile, and misc" performs maintenance work on the DAMON documentation (SeongJae Park) - "mm: add and use vma_assert_stabilised() helper" refactors and cleans up the core VMA code. The main aim here is to be able to use the mmap write lock's lockdep state to perform various assertions regarding the locking which the VMA code requires (Lorenzo Stoakes) - "mm, swap: swap table phase II: unify swapin use" removes some old swap code (swap cache bypassing and swap synchronization) which wasn't working very well. Various other cleanups and simplifications were made. The end result is a 20% speedup in one benchmark (Kairui Song) - "enable PT_RECLAIM on more 64-bit architectures" makes PT_RECLAIM available on 64-bit alpha, loongarch, mips, parisc, and um. Various cleanups were performed along the way (Qi Zheng) * tag 'mm-stable-2026-02-11-19-22' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm: (325 commits) mm/memory: handle non-split locks correctly in zap_empty_pte_table() mm: move pte table reclaim code to memory.c mm: make PT_RECLAIM depends on MMU_GATHER_RCU_TABLE_FREE mm: convert __HAVE_ARCH_TLB_REMOVE_TABLE to CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_TLB_REMOVE_TABLE config um: mm: enable MMU_GATHER_RCU_TABLE_FREE parisc: mm: enable MMU_GATHER_RCU_TABLE_FREE mips: mm: enable MMU_GATHER_RCU_TABLE_FREE LoongArch: mm: enable MMU_GATHER_RCU_TABLE_FREE alpha: mm: enable MMU_GATHER_RCU_TABLE_FREE mm: change mm/pt_reclaim.c to use asm/tlb.h instead of asm-generic/tlb.h mm/damon/stat: remove __read_mostly from memory_idle_ms_percentiles zsmalloc: make common caches global mm: add SPDX id lines to some mm source files mm/zswap: use %pe to print error pointers mm/vmscan: use %pe to print error pointers mm/readahead: fix typo in comment mm: khugepaged: fix NR_FILE_PAGES and NR_SHMEM in collapse_file() mm: refactor vma_map_pages to use vm_insert_pages mm/damon: unify address range representation with damon_addr_range mm/cma: replace snprintf with strscpy in cma_new_area ...

Merge tag 'vfs-6.19-rc8.fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs

2026-01-26T17:30:48Z

Pull vfs fixes from Christian Brauner: - Fix the the buggy conversion of fuse_reverse_inval_entry() introduced during the creation rework - Disallow nfs delegation requests for directories by setting simple_nosetlease() - Require an opt-in for getting readdir flag bits outside of S_DT_MASK set in d_type - Fix scheduling delayed writeback work by only scheduling when the dirty time expiry interval is non-zero and cancel the delayed work if the interval is set to zero - Use rounded_jiffies_interval for dirty time work - Check the return value of sb_set_blocksize() for romfs - Wait for batched folios to be stable in __iomap_get_folio() - Use private naming for fuse hash size - Fix the stale dentry cleanup to prevent a race that causes a UAF * tag 'vfs-6.19-rc8.fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs: vfs: document d_dispose_if_unused() fuse: shrink once after all buckets have been scanned fuse: clean up fuse_dentry_tree_work() fuse: add need_resched() before unlocking bucket fuse: make sure dentry is evicted if stale fuse: fix race when disposing stale dentries fuse: use private naming for fuse hash size writeback: use round_jiffies_relative for dirtytime_work iomap: wait for batched folios to be stable in __iomap_get_folio romfs: check sb_set_blocksize() return value docs: clarify that dirtytime_expire_seconds=0 disables writeback writeback: fix 100% CPU usage when dirtytime_expire_interval is 0 readdir: require opt-in for d_type flags vboxsf: don't allow delegations to be set on directories ceph: don't allow delegations to be set on directories gfs2: don't allow delegations to be set on directories 9p: don't allow delegations to be set on directories smb/client: properly disallow delegations on directories nfs: properly disallow delegation requests on directories fuse: fix conversion of fuse_reverse_inval_entry() to start_removing()

mm, hugetlb: implement movable_gigantic_pages sysctl

2026-01-21T03:24:50Z

This reintroduces a concept removed by: commit d6cb41cc44c6 ("mm, hugetlb: remove hugepages_treat_as_movable sysctl") This sysctl provides flexibility between ZONE_MOVABLE use cases: 1) onlining memory in ZONE_MOVABLE to maintain hotplug compatibility 2) onlining memory in ZONE_MOVABLE to make hugepage allocate reliable When ZONE_MOVABLE is used to make huge page allocation more reliable, disallowing gigantic pages memory in this region is pointless. If hotplug is not a requirement, we can loosen the restrictions to allow 1GB gigantic pages in ZONE_MOVABLE. Since 1GB can be difficult to migrate / has impacts on compaction / defragmentation, we don't enable this by default. Notably, 1GB pages can only be migrated if another 1GB page is available - so hot-unplug will fail if such a page cannot be found. However, since there are scenarios where gigantic pages are migratable, we should allow use of these on movable regions. When not valid 1GB is available for migration, hot-unplug will retry indefinitely (or until interrupted). For example: echo 0 > node0/hugepages/..-1GB/nr_hugepages # clear node0 1GB pages echo 1 > node1/hugepages/..-1GB/nr_hugepages # reserve node1 1GB page ./alloc_huge_node1 & # Allocate a 1GB page on node1 ./node1_offline & # attempt to offline all node1 memory echo 1 > node0/hugepages/..-1GB/nr_hugepages # reserve node0 1GB page In this example, node1_offline will block indefinitely until the final step, when a node0 1GB page is made available. Note: Boot-time CMA is not possible for driver-managed hotplug memory, as CMA requires the memory to be registered as SystemRAM at boot time. Additionally, 1GB huge pages are not supported by THP. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251221125603.2364174-1-gourry@gourry.net Signed-off-by: Gregory Price Suggested-by: David Rientjes Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20180201193132.Hk7vI_xaU%25akpm@linux-foundation.org/ Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) Acked-by: David Rientjes Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Michal Hocko Cc: "David Hildenbrand (Red Hat)" Cc: Gregory Price Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Liam Howlett Cc: Lorenzo Stoakes Cc: Mike Rapoport Cc: Muchun Song Cc: Oscar Salvador Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan Cc: Vlastimil Babka Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

mm/block/fs: remove laptop_mode

2026-01-21T03:24:47Z

Laptop mode was introduced to save battery, by delaying and consolidating writes and thereby maximize the time rotating hard drives wouldn't have to spin. Luckily, rotating hard drives, with their high spin-up times and power draw, are a thing of the past for battery-powered devices. Reclaim has also since changed to not write single filesystem pages anymore, and regular filesystem writeback is lumpy by design. The juice doesn't appear worth the squeeze anymore. The footprint of the feature is small, but nevertheless it's a complicating factor in mm, block, filesystems. Developers don't think about it, and it likely hasn't been tested with new reclaim and writeback changes in years. Let's sunset it. Keep the sysctl with a deprecation warning around for a few more cycles, but remove all functionality behind it. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix Documentation/admin-guide/laptops/index.rst] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251216185201.GH905277@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Suggested-by: Christoph Hellwig Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig Acked-by: Jens Axboe Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt Acked-by: Michal Hocko Cc: Deepanshu Kartikey Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

Docs/mm/allocation-profiling: describe sysctrl limitations in debug mode

2026-01-20T17:34:26Z

When CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_DEBUG=y, /proc/sys/vm/mem_profiling is read-only to avoid debug warnings in a scenario when an allocation is made while profiling is disabled (allocation does not get an allocation tag), then profiling gets enabled and allocation gets freed (warning due to the allocation missing allocation tag). Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260116184423.2708363-1-surenb@google.com Fixes: ebdf9ad4ca98 ("memprofiling: documentation") Reported-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan Acked-by: SeongJae Park Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Kent Overstreet Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) Cc: Ran Xiaokai Cc: SeongJae Park Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

docs: clarify that dirtytime_expire_seconds=0 disables writeback

2026-01-12T10:07:25Z

Document that setting vm.dirtytime_expire_seconds to zero disables periodic dirtytime writeback, matching the behavior of the related dirty_writeback_centisecs sysctl which already documents this. Signed-off-by: Laveesh Bansal Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260106145059.543282-3-laveeshb@laveeshbansal.com Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner

docs: Remove colon from ctltable title in vm.rst

2025-07-23T09:57:05Z

Removing them solves an issue where they were incorrectly considered as not implemented by the check-sysctl-docs script Signed-off-by: Joel Granados

Merge tag 'mm-stable-2025-05-31-14-50' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm

2025-05-31T22:44:16Z

Pull MM updates from Andrew Morton: - "Add folio_mk_pte()" from Matthew Wilcox simplifies the act of creating a pte which addresses the first page in a folio and reduces the amount of plumbing which architecture must implement to provide this. - "Misc folio patches for 6.16" from Matthew Wilcox is a shower of largely unrelated folio infrastructure changes which clean things up and better prepare us for future work. - "memory,x86,acpi: hotplug memory alignment advisement" from Gregory Price adds early-init code to prevent x86 from leaving physical memory unused when physical address regions are not aligned to memory block size. - "mm/compaction: allow more aggressive proactive compaction" from Michal Clapinski provides some tuning of the (sadly, hard-coded (more sadly, not auto-tuned)) thresholds for our invokation of proactive compaction. In a simple test case, the reduction of a guest VM's memory consumption was dramatic. - "Minor cleanups and improvements to swap freeing code" from Kemeng Shi provides some code cleaups and a small efficiency improvement to this part of our swap handling code. - "ptrace: introduce PTRACE_SET_SYSCALL_INFO API" from Dmitry Levin adds the ability for a ptracer to modify syscalls arguments. At this time we can alter only "system call information that are used by strace system call tampering, namely, syscall number, syscall arguments, and syscall return value. This series should have been incorporated into mm.git's "non-MM" branch, but I goofed. - "fs/proc: extend the PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl to report guard regions" from Andrei Vagin extends the info returned by the PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl against /proc/pid/pagemap. This permits CRIU to more efficiently get at the info about guard regions. - "Fix parameter passed to page_mapcount_is_type()" from Gavin Shan implements that fix. No runtime effect is expected because validate_page_before_insert() happens to fix up this error. - "kernel/events/uprobes: uprobe_write_opcode() rewrite" from David Hildenbrand basically brings uprobe text poking into the current decade. Remove a bunch of hand-rolled implementation in favor of using more current facilities. - "mm/ptdump: Drop assumption that pxd_val() is u64" from Anshuman Khandual provides enhancements and generalizations to the pte dumping code. This might be needed when 128-bit Page Table Descriptors are enabled for ARM. - "Always call constructor for kernel page tables" from Kevin Brodsky ensures that the ctor/dtor is always called for kernel pgtables, as it already is for user pgtables. This permits the addition of more functionality such as "insert hooks to protect page tables". This change does result in various architectures performing unnecesary work, but this is fixed up where it is anticipated to occur. - "Rust support for mm_struct, vm_area_struct, and mmap" from Alice Ryhl adds plumbing to permit Rust access to core MM structures. - "fix incorrectly disallowed anonymous VMA merges" from Lorenzo Stoakes takes advantage of some VMA merging opportunities which we've been missing for 15 years. - "mm/madvise: batch tlb flushes for MADV_DONTNEED and MADV_FREE" from SeongJae Park optimizes process_madvise()'s TLB flushing. Instead of flushing each address range in the provided iovec, we batch the flushing across all the iovec entries. The syscall's cost was approximately halved with a microbenchmark which was designed to load this particular operation. - "Track node vacancy to reduce worst case allocation counts" from Sidhartha Kumar makes the maple tree smarter about its node preallocation. stress-ng mmap performance increased by single-digit percentages and the amount of unnecessarily preallocated memory was dramaticelly reduced. - "mm/gup: Minor fix, cleanup and improvements" from Baoquan He removes a few unnecessary things which Baoquan noted when reading the code. - ""Enhance sysfs handling for memory hotplug in weighted interleave" from Rakie Kim "enhances the weighted interleave policy in the memory management subsystem by improving sysfs handling, fixing memory leaks, and introducing dynamic sysfs updates for memory hotplug support". Fixes things on error paths which we are unlikely to hit. - "mm/damon: auto-tune DAMOS for NUMA setups including tiered memory" from SeongJae Park introduces new DAMOS quota goal metrics which eliminate the manual tuning which is required when utilizing DAMON for memory tiering. - "mm/vmalloc.c: code cleanup and improvements" from Baoquan He provides cleanups and small efficiency improvements which Baoquan found via code inspection. - "vmscan: enforce mems_effective during demotion" from Gregory Price changes reclaim to respect cpuset.mems_effective during demotion when possible. because presently, reclaim explicitly ignores cpuset.mems_effective when demoting, which may cause the cpuset settings to violated. This is useful for isolating workloads on a multi-tenant system from certain classes of memory more consistently. - "Clean up split_huge_pmd_locked() and remove unnecessary folio pointers" from Gavin Guo provides minor cleanups and efficiency gains in in the huge page splitting and migrating code. - "Use kmem_cache for memcg alloc" from Huan Yang creates a slab cache for `struct mem_cgroup', yielding improved memory utilization. - "add max arg to swappiness in memory.reclaim and lru_gen" from Zhongkun He adds a new "max" argument to the "swappiness=" argument for memory.reclaim MGLRU's lru_gen. This directs proactive reclaim to reclaim from only anon folios rather than file-backed folios. - "kexec: introduce Kexec HandOver (KHO)" from Mike Rapoport is the first step on the path to permitting the kernel to maintain existing VMs while replacing the host kernel via file-based kexec. At this time only memblock's reserve_mem is preserved. - "mm: Introduce for_each_valid_pfn()" from David Woodhouse provides and uses a smarter way of looping over a pfn range. By skipping ranges of invalid pfns. - "sched/numa: Skip VMA scanning on memory pinned to one NUMA node via cpuset.mems" from Libo Chen removes a lot of pointless VMA scanning when a task is pinned a single NUMA mode. Dramatic performance benefits were seen in some real world cases. - "JFS: Implement migrate_folio for jfs_metapage_aops" from Shivank Garg addresses a warning which occurs during memory compaction when using JFS. - "move all VMA allocation, freeing and duplication logic to mm" from Lorenzo Stoakes moves some VMA code from kernel/fork.c into the more appropriate mm/vma.c. - "mm, swap: clean up swap cache mapping helper" from Kairui Song provides code consolidation and cleanups related to the folio_index() function. - "mm/gup: Cleanup memfd_pin_folios()" from Vishal Moola does that. - "memcg: Fix test_memcg_min/low test failures" from Waiman Long addresses some bogus failures which are being reported by the test_memcontrol selftest. - "eliminate mmap() retry merge, add .mmap_prepare hook" from Lorenzo Stoakes commences the deprecation of file_operations.mmap() in favor of the new file_operations.mmap_prepare(). The latter is more restrictive and prevents drivers from messing with things in ways which, amongst other problems, may defeat VMA merging. - "memcg: decouple memcg and objcg stocks"" from Shakeel Butt decouples the per-cpu memcg charge cache from the objcg's one. This is a step along the way to making memcg and objcg charging NMI-safe, which is a BPF requirement. - "mm/damon: minor fixups and improvements for code, tests, and documents" from SeongJae Park is yet another batch of miscellaneous DAMON changes. Fix and improve minor problems in code, tests and documents. - "memcg: make memcg stats irq safe" from Shakeel Butt converts memcg stats to be irq safe. Another step along the way to making memcg charging and stats updates NMI-safe, a BPF requirement. - "Let unmap_hugepage_range() and several related functions take folio instead of page" from Fan Ni provides folio conversions in the hugetlb code. * tag 'mm-stable-2025-05-31-14-50' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm: (285 commits) mm: pcp: increase pcp->free_count threshold to trigger free_high mm/hugetlb: convert use of struct page to folio in __unmap_hugepage_range() mm/hugetlb: refactor __unmap_hugepage_range() to take folio instead of page mm/hugetlb: refactor unmap_hugepage_range() to take folio instead of page mm/hugetlb: pass folio instead of page to unmap_ref_private() memcg: objcg stock trylock without irq disabling memcg: no stock lock for cpu hot-unplug memcg: make __mod_memcg_lruvec_state re-entrant safe against irqs memcg: make count_memcg_events re-entrant safe against irqs memcg: make mod_memcg_state re-entrant safe against irqs memcg: move preempt disable to callers of memcg_rstat_updated memcg: memcg_rstat_updated re-entrant safe against irqs mm: khugepaged: decouple SHMEM and file folios' collapse selftests/eventfd: correct test name and improve messages alloc_tag: check mem_profiling_support in alloc_tag_init Docs/damon: update titles and brief introductions to explain DAMOS selftests/damon/_damon_sysfs: read tried regions directories in order mm/damon/tests/core-kunit: add a test for damos_set_filters_default_reject() mm/damon/paddr: remove unused variable, folio_list, in damon_pa_stat() mm/damon/sysfs-schemes: fix wrong comment on damons_sysfs_quota_goal_metric_strs ...

vfs: Add sysctl vfs_cache_pressure_denom for bulk file operations

2025-05-15T09:12:59Z

On our HDFS servers with 12 HDDs per server, a HDFS datanode[0] startup involves scanning all files and caching their metadata (including dentries and inodes) in memory. Each HDD contains approximately 2 million files, resulting in a total of ~20 million cached dentries after initialization. To minimize dentry reclamation, we set vfs_cache_pressure to 1. Despite this configuration, memory pressure conditions can still trigger reclamation of up to 50% of cached dentries, reducing the cache from 20 million to approximately 10 million entries. During the subsequent cache rebuild period, any HDFS datanode restart operation incurs substantial latency penalties until full cache recovery completes. To maintain service stability, we need to preserve more dentries during memory reclamation. The current minimum reclaim ratio (1/100 of total dentries) remains too aggressive for our workload. This patch introduces vfs_cache_pressure_denom for more granular cache pressure control. The configuration [vfs_cache_pressure=1, vfs_cache_pressure_denom=10000] effectively maintains the full 20 million dentry cache under memory pressure, preventing datanode restart performance degradation. Link: https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r1.2.1/hdfs_design.html#NameNode+and+DataNodes [0] Signed-off-by: Yafang Shao Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20250511083624.9305-1-laoar.shao@gmail.com Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner

mm/compaction: reduce the difference between low and high watermarks

2025-05-12T00:48:10Z

Reduce the diff between low and high watermarks when compaction proactiveness is set to high. This allows users who set the proactiveness really high to have more stable fragmentation score over time. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250404111103.1994507-3-mclapinski@google.com Signed-off-by: Michal Clapinski Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Vlastimil Babka Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton