Based on kernel version 4.16.1. Page generated on 2018-04-09 11:53 EST.
1 Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10 2 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> 3 4 'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation 5 for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in 6 the source...' 7 8 Well, this documentation is written because some people either 9 don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't 10 have the time or knowledge to read the source code. 11 12 Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to 13 be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-) 14 15 ============================================================== 16 17 Legal blurb: 18 19 As usual, there are two main things to consider: 20 1. you get what you pay for 21 2. it's free 22 23 The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of 24 this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you 25 screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't 26 feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you... 27 28 But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using 29 only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of 30 it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that 31 you're the last RTFMing person to screw up. 32 33 In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror 34 stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org> 35 36 Rik van Riel. 37 38 ============================================================== 39 40 Introduction: 41 42 Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel 43 at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you 44 don't even need special tools to do it! 45 In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config 46 facilities: 47 - a running Linux system 48 - root access 49 - common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days) 50 - knowledge of what all those values mean 51 52 As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of 53 several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about 54 one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece 55 by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'. 56 57 The subdirs are about: 58 abi/ execution domains & personalities 59 debug/ <empty> 60 dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info) 61 fs/ specific filesystems 62 filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning 63 binfmt_misc <Documentation/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst> 64 kernel/ global kernel info / tuning 65 miscellaneous stuff 66 net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in: 67 <Documentation/networking/> 68 proc/ <empty> 69 sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS) 70 vm/ memory management tuning 71 buffer and cache management 72 user/ Per user per user namespace limits 73 74 These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more 75 or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd 76 really like to hear about it :-)