summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Documentation/sysctl
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorAndi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>2009-09-16 11:50:15 +0200
committerAndi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>2009-09-16 11:50:15 +0200
commit6a46079cf57a7f7758e8b926980a4f852f89b34d (patch)
treeefd72e830201370d6273bd436dda5a3c4cd6ed9b /Documentation/sysctl
parent4db96cf077aa938b11fe7ac79ecc9b29ec00fbab (diff)
HWPOISON: The high level memory error handler in the VM v7
Add the high level memory handler that poisons pages that got corrupted by hardware (typically by a two bit flip in a DIMM or a cache) on the Linux level. The goal is to prevent everyone from accessing these pages in the future. This done at the VM level by marking a page hwpoisoned and doing the appropriate action based on the type of page it is. The code that does this is portable and lives in mm/memory-failure.c To quote the overview comment: High level machine check handler. Handles pages reported by the hardware as being corrupted usually due to a 2bit ECC memory or cache failure. This focuses on pages detected as corrupted in the background. When the current CPU tries to consume corruption the currently running process can just be killed directly instead. This implies that if the error cannot be handled for some reason it's safe to just ignore it because no corruption has been consumed yet. Instead when that happens another machine check will happen. Handles page cache pages in various states. The tricky part here is that we can access any page asynchronous to other VM users, because memory failures could happen anytime and anywhere, possibly violating some of their assumptions. This is why this code has to be extremely careful. Generally it tries to use normal locking rules, as in get the standard locks, even if that means the error handling takes potentially a long time. Some of the operations here are somewhat inefficient and have non linear algorithmic complexity, because the data structures have not been optimized for this case. This is in particular the case for the mapping from a vma to a process. Since this case is expected to be rare we hope we can get away with this. There are in principle two strategies to kill processes on poison: - just unmap the data and wait for an actual reference before killing - kill as soon as corruption is detected. Both have advantages and disadvantages and should be used in different situations. Right now both are implemented and can be switched with a new sysctl vm.memory_failure_early_kill The default is early kill. The patch does some rmap data structure walking on its own to collect processes to kill. This is unusual because normally all rmap data structure knowledge is in rmap.c only. I put it here for now to keep everything together and rmap knowledge has been seeping out anyways Includes contributions from Johannes Weiner, Chris Mason, Fengguang Wu, Nick Piggin (who did a lot of great work) and others. Cc: npiggin@suse.de Cc: riel@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Hidehiro Kawai <hidehiro.kawai.ez@hitachi.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt41
1 files changed, 40 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index c4de6359d440..faf62740aa2c 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -32,6 +32,8 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- legacy_va_layout
- lowmem_reserve_ratio
- max_map_count
+- memory_failure_early_kill
+- memory_failure_recovery
- min_free_kbytes
- min_slab_ratio
- min_unmapped_ratio
@@ -53,7 +55,6 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- vfs_cache_pressure
- zone_reclaim_mode
-
==============================================================
block_dump
@@ -275,6 +276,44 @@ e.g., up to one or two maps per allocation.
The default value is 65536.
+=============================================================
+
+memory_failure_early_kill:
+
+Control how to kill processes when uncorrected memory error (typically
+a 2bit error in a memory module) is detected in the background by hardware
+that cannot be handled by the kernel. In some cases (like the page
+still having a valid copy on disk) the kernel will handle the failure
+transparently without affecting any applications. But if there is
+no other uptodate copy of the data it will kill to prevent any data
+corruptions from propagating.
+
+1: Kill all processes that have the corrupted and not reloadable page mapped
+as soon as the corruption is detected. Note this is not supported
+for a few types of pages, like kernel internally allocated data or
+the swap cache, but works for the majority of user pages.
+
+0: Only unmap the corrupted page from all processes and only kill a process
+who tries to access it.
+
+The kill is done using a catchable SIGBUS with BUS_MCEERR_AO, so processes can
+handle this if they want to.
+
+This is only active on architectures/platforms with advanced machine
+check handling and depends on the hardware capabilities.
+
+Applications can override this setting individually with the PR_MCE_KILL prctl
+
+==============================================================
+
+memory_failure_recovery
+
+Enable memory failure recovery (when supported by the platform)
+
+1: Attempt recovery.
+
+0: Always panic on a memory failure.
+
==============================================================
min_free_kbytes: