On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Mel Gorman wrote: > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 04:18:18PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:02:36 +0000 > > Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 04:47:49PM +0100, Petr Holasek wrote: > > > > When user insert negative value into /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages it will result > > > > in the setting a random number of HugePages in system (can be easily showed > > > > at /proc/meminfo output). > > > > > > I bet you a shiny penny that the value of HugePages becomes the maximum > > > number that could be allocated by the system at the time rather than a > > > random value. > > > > That seems to be the case from my reading. In which case the patch > > removes probably-undocumented and possibly-useful existing behavior. > > > > It's not proof that no one does this but I'm not aware of any documentation > related to hugetlbfs that recommends writing negative values to take advantage > of this side-effect. It's more likely they simply wrote a very large number > to nr_hugepages if they wanted "as many hugepages as possible" as it makes > more intuitive sense than asking for a negative amount of pages. hugeadm at > least is not depending on this behaviour AFAIK. That is correct, hugeadm never writes negative values to huge page pool sizes.
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