linux-yocto/Documentation/sysctl
H. Peter Anvin d75757abd0 doc: Add documentation for bootloader_{type,version}
Add documentation for kernel/bootloader_type and
kernel/bootloader_version to sysctl/kernel.txt.  This should really
have been done a long time ago.

Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Shen Feng <shen@cn.fujitsu.com>
2009-12-11 14:28:56 -08:00
..
00-INDEX documentation: update Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt and Documentation/sysctls 2009-04-02 19:04:53 -07:00
abi.txt
fs.txt Documentation: update stale definition of file-nr in fs.txt 2009-09-24 07:20:57 -07:00
kernel.txt doc: Add documentation for bootloader_{type,version} 2009-12-11 14:28:56 -08:00
net.txt Documentation/sysctl/net.txt: fix a typo 2009-04-13 15:04:28 -07:00
README
sunrpc.txt
vm.txt tree-wide: fix assorted typos all over the place 2009-12-04 15:39:55 +01:00

Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel riel@nl.linux.org

'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even want documentation for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in the source...'

Well, this documentation is written because some people either don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't have the time or knowledge to read the source code.

Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-)

==============================================================

Legal blurb:

As usual, there are two main things to consider:

  1. you get what you pay for
  2. it's free

The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you...

But of course, if you do manage to screw up your system using only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that you're the last RTFMing person to screw up.

In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror stories to: riel@nl.linux.org

Rik van Riel.

==============================================================

Introduction:

Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you don't even need special tools to do it! In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config facilities:

  • a running Linux system
  • root access
  • common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days)
  • knowledge of what all those values mean

As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'.

The subdirs are about: abi/ execution domains & personalities debug/ dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info) fs/ specific filesystems filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning binfmt_misc <Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt> kernel/ global kernel info / tuning miscellaneous stuff net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in: <Documentation/networking/> proc/ sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS) vm/ memory management tuning buffer and cache management

These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd really like to hear about it :-)