This series adds support for something that seems like many people always wanted but nobody added it yet, so here's the ability to set sysctl parameters via kernel command line options in the form of sysctl.vm.something=1 The important part is Patch 1. The second, not so important part is an attempt to clean up legacy one-off parameters that do the same thing as a sysctl. I don't want to remove them completely for compatibility reasons, but with generic sysctl support the idea is to remove the one-off param handlers and treat the parameters as aliases for the sysctl variants. I have identified several parameters that mention sysctl counterparts in Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt but there might be more. The conversion also has varying level of success: - numa_zonelist_order is converted in Patch 2 together with adding the necessary infrastructure. It's easy as it doesn't really do anything but warn on deprecated value these days. - hung_task_panic is converted in Patch 3, but there's a downside that now it only accepts 0 and 1, while previously it was any integer value - nmi_watchdog maps to two sysctls nmi_watchdog and hardlockup_panic, so there's no straighforward conversion possible - traceoff_on_warning is a flag without value and it would be required to handle that somehow in the conversion infractructure, which seems pointless for a single flag Vlastimil Babka (3): kernel/sysctl: support setting sysctl parameters from kernel command line kernel/sysctl: support handling command line aliases kernel/hung_task convert hung_task_panic boot parameter to sysctl Changes since v1: - add missing newlines on printk's - more adjustments to proc mount param passing (Kees) - rebase to 5.7-rc1 - add acks/reviews - test driver (how to pass a testing boot parameter without bootloader specific steps) still under discussion - new Kconfig? bootconfig? .../admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 11 +- fs/proc/proc_sysctl.c | 142 ++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/sysctl.h | 4 + init/main.c | 2 + kernel/hung_task.c | 10 -- mm/page_alloc.c | 9 -- 6 files changed, 158 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-) -- 2.26.0