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TTY, devpts: document pty count limiting

PATCH RESEND New Konstantin Khlebnikov 1 participant 1 message Feb 21, 2016 Documentation

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PATCH RESEND 1/1 TTY, devpts: document pty count limiting

Logic has been changed in kernel 3.4 by commit e9aba5158a80 ("tty: rework pty count limiting") but still not documented.

Sysctl kernel.pty.max works as global limit, kernel.pty.reserve ptys are reserved for initial devpts instance (mounted without "newinstance"). Per-instance limit also could be set by mount option "max=%d".

---
 Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt |    9 +++++++++
 Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt      |    1 +
 2 files changed, 10 insertions(+)
Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt +9 -0
index 68dffd87f9b7..30d2fcb32f72 100644
@@ -51,6 +51,15 @@ where 'ns_exec -cm /bin/bash' calls clone() with CLONE_NEWNS flag and execs
 /bin/bash in the child process.  A pty created by the sshd is not visible in
 the original mount of /dev/pts.
 
+Total count of pty pairs in all instances is limited by sysctls:
+kernel.pty.max = 4096		- global limit
+kernel.pty.reserve = 1024	- reserve for initial instance
+kernel.pty.nr			- current count of ptys
+
+Per-instance limit could be set by adding mount option "max=<count>".
+This feature was added in kernel 3.4 together with sysctl kernel.pty.reserve.
+In kernels older than 3.4 sysctl kernel.pty.max works as per-instance limit.
+
 User-space changes
 ------------------
 
Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt +1 -0
index a93b414672a7..d05e70b7d8dd 100644
@@ -64,6 +64,7 @@ show up in /proc/sys/kernel:
 - printk_delay
 - printk_ratelimit
 - printk_ratelimit_burst
+- pty                         ==> Documentation/filesystems/devpts.txt
 - randomize_va_space
 - real-root-dev               ==> Documentation/initrd.txt
 - reboot-cmd                  [ SPARC only ]