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Documentation: file handles are now freed
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Since file handles are freed, a little amendment to the documentation

Signed-off-by: Federica Teodori <federica.teodori@googlemail.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Federica Teodori authored and Linus Torvalds committed Mar 16, 2011
1 parent aa4862c commit ca3b78a
Showing 1 changed file with 8 additions and 9 deletions.
17 changes: 8 additions & 9 deletions Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -88,20 +88,19 @@ you might want to raise the limit.

file-max & file-nr:

The kernel allocates file handles dynamically, but as yet it
doesn't free them again.

The value in file-max denotes the maximum number of file-
handles that the Linux kernel will allocate. When you get lots
of error messages about running out of file handles, you might
want to increase this limit.

Historically, the three values in file-nr denoted the number of
allocated file handles, the number of allocated but unused file
handles, and the maximum number of file handles. Linux 2.6 always
reports 0 as the number of free file handles -- this is not an
error, it just means that the number of allocated file handles
exactly matches the number of used file handles.
Historically,the kernel was able to allocate file handles
dynamically, but not to free them again. The three values in
file-nr denote the number of allocated file handles, the number
of allocated but unused file handles, and the maximum number of
file handles. Linux 2.6 always reports 0 as the number of free
file handles -- this is not an error, it just means that the
number of allocated file handles exactly matches the number of
used file handles.

Attempts to allocate more file descriptors than file-max are
reported with printk, look for "VFS: file-max limit <number>
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