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My machine has roughly 8GB of RAM. Why is min_free_kbytes set to 67584? The kernel code comment says I should expect to see min_free_kbytes set to around 11584. It also says the largest it would set it to is 65536.

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes
67584

$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          7.7Gi       3.2Gi       615Mi       510Mi       3.9Gi       3.7Gi
Swap:         2.0Gi       707Mi       1.3Gi

$ grep -r min_free_kbytes /etc/sysctl*  # No manual configuration
$

$ uname -r  # My kernel version
5.0.17-200.fc29.x86_64

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.0.17/source/mm/page_alloc.c#L7567

/*
 * Initialise min_free_kbytes.
 *
 * For small machines we want it small (128k min).  For large machines
 * we want it large (64MB max).  But it is not linear, because network
 * bandwidth does not increase linearly with machine size.  We use
 *
 *  min_free_kbytes = 4 * sqrt(lowmem_kbytes), for better accuracy:
 *  min_free_kbytes = sqrt(lowmem_kbytes * 16)
 *
 * which yields
 *
 * 16MB:    512k
 * 32MB:    724k
 * 64MB:    1024k
 * 128MB:   1448k
 * 256MB:   2048k
 * 512MB:   2896k
 * 1024MB:  4096k
 * 2048MB:  5792k
 * 4096MB:  8192k
 * 8192MB:  11584k
 * 16384MB: 16384k
 */
sourcejedi
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1 Answers1

0

On systems using huge pages, it is recommended that min_free_kbytes is higher and it is tuned with hugeadm --set-recommended-min_free_kbytes. With the introduction of transparent huge page support, this recommended value is also applied [...]

On X86-64 with 4G of memory, min_free_kbytes becomes 67584.

https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg14044.html

/* Ensure 2 pageblocks are free to assist fragmentation avoidance */
recommended_min = pageblock_nr_pages * nr_zones * 2;

/*
 * Make sure that on average at least two pageblocks are almost free
 * of another type, one for a migratetype to fall back to and a
 * second to avoid subsequent fallbacks of other types There are 3
 * MIGRATE_TYPES we care about.
 */
recommended_min += pageblock_nr_pages * nr_zones *
           MIGRATE_PCPTYPES * MIGRATE_PCPTYPES;

linux-5.0.17/mm//mm/khugepaged.c:1862

A "pageblock" is a potential huge page: 2MiB on x86-64. This calculation says min_free is 2MiB * 11 * nr_zones. "With 4G of memory" you have at least three zones: "normal", "DMA32", and "DMA" (DMA16).

2 * 11 * 3 = 66 MiB.

66 MiB = 66 * 1024 = 67584 KiB.

The reason separate "normal" and DMA32 zones appear even on 4G systems is: "the tiny pci32 zone that materialize on 4g systems that relocate some little memory over 4g to make space for the pci32 mmio."

sourcejedi
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