documentation: update how page-cluster affects swap I/O

Fix of the documentation of /proc/sys/vm/page-cluster to match the
behavior of the code and add some comments about what the tunable will
change in that behavior.

Signed-off-by: Christian Ehrhardt <ehrhardt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 96f0ee825be..84eb25cd69a 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -574,16 +574,24 @@ of physical RAM.  See above.
 
 page-cluster
 
-page-cluster controls the number of pages which are written to swap in
-a single attempt.  The swap I/O size.
+page-cluster controls the number of pages up to which consecutive pages
+are read in from swap in a single attempt. This is the swap counterpart
+to page cache readahead.
+The mentioned consecutivity is not in terms of virtual/physical addresses,
+but consecutive on swap space - that means they were swapped out together.
 
 It is a logarithmic value - setting it to zero means "1 page", setting
 it to 1 means "2 pages", setting it to 2 means "4 pages", etc.
+Zero disables swap readahead completely.
 
 The default value is three (eight pages at a time).  There may be some
 small benefits in tuning this to a different value if your workload is
 swap-intensive.
 
+Lower values mean lower latencies for initial faults, but at the same time
+extra faults and I/O delays for following faults if they would have been part of
+that consecutive pages readahead would have brought in.
+
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 panic_on_oom