mm: document improved handling of swappiness==0

Prior to commit fe35004fbf9e ("mm: avoid swapping out with
swappiness==0") setting swappiness to 0, reclaim code could still evict
recently used user anonymous memory to swap even though there is a
significant amount of RAM used for page cache.

The behaviour of setting swappiness to 0 has since changed.  When set,
the reclaim code does not initiate swap until the amount of free pages
and file-backed pages, is less than the high water mark in a zone.

Let's update the documentation to reflect this.

[[email protected]: remove comma, per Randy]
Signed-off-by: Aaron Tomlin <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Bryn M. Reeves <[email protected]>
Cc: Satoru Moriya <[email protected]>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 9f5481bdc5a43f942fb833f3131901249d2d5c50..d614a9b6a28048ecf879e96b3aada686ecadb6cb 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -696,7 +696,9 @@ swappiness
 
 This control is used to define how aggressive the kernel will swap
 memory pages.  Higher values will increase agressiveness, lower values
-decrease the amount of swap.
+decrease the amount of swap.  A value of 0 instructs the kernel not to
+initiate swap until the amount of free and file-backed pages is less
+than the high water mark in a zone.
 
 The default value is 60.