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-rw-r--r--Documentation/vm/ksm.txt14
1 files changed, 14 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
index f34a8ee6f860..0c64a81d6808 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