xref: /linux/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/index.rst (revision c532de5a67a70f8533d495f8f2aaa9a0491c3ad0)
1===========================
2Documentation for /proc/sys
3===========================
4
5Copyright (c) 1998, 1999,  Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>
6
7------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8
9'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation
10for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in
11the source...'
12
13Well, this documentation is written because some people either
14don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't
15have the time or knowledge to read the source code.
16
17Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to
18be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-)
19
20------------------------------------------------------------------------------
21
22Legal blurb:
23
24As usual, there are two main things to consider:
25
261. you get what you pay for
272. it's free
28
29The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of
30this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you
31screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't
32feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you...
33
34But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using
35only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of
36it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that
37you're the last RTFMing person to screw up.
38
39In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror
40stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org>
41
42Rik van Riel.
43
44--------------------------------------------------------------
45
46Introduction
47============
48
49Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel
50at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you
51don't even need special tools to do it!
52In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config
53facilities:
54
55- a running Linux system
56- root access
57- common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days)
58- knowledge of what all those values mean
59
60As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of
61several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about
62one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece
63by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'.
64
65This documentation is about:
66
67=============== ===============================================================
68abi/		execution domains & personalities
69debug/		<empty>
70dev/		device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info)
71fs/		specific filesystems
72		filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning
73		binfmt_misc <Documentation/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst>
74kernel/		global kernel info / tuning
75		miscellaneous stuff
76net/		networking stuff, for documentation look in:
77		<Documentation/networking/>
78proc/		<empty>
79sunrpc/		SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS)
80vm/		memory management tuning
81		buffer and cache management
82user/		Per user per user namespace limits
83=============== ===============================================================
84
85These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more
86or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd
87really like to hear about it :-)
88
89.. toctree::
90   :maxdepth: 1
91
92   abi
93   fs
94   kernel
95   net
96   sunrpc
97   user
98   vm
99