Hi, I'm new to unix development and I have a few questions about sysctl, since I couldn't find a definitive answer online. I hope to find a good explanation from here. The following is from BeagleBoardAndOpenEmbeddedGit beagleboard development wiki in sequence: ^ sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf vm.vdso_enabled = 0 vm.mmap_min_addr = 0 sudo sysctl -p (1) sudo -s echo -e "vm.vdso_enabled = 0\nvm.mmap_min_addr = 0" > /etc/sysctl.d/60-oe-settings.conf exit sudo invoke-rc.d procps start $ My questions: 1. This seems like a very basic question, but what does "sudo sysctl -p" do? I followed the command sequence both with and without that line and found both to be working just fine. 2. How does 60-oe-settings.conf that just got created here relate to sysctl.conf? btw, these commands are in the context of configuring sysctl.conf. 3. Finally, what does invoke-rc.d procps start do? Thank you in advance, Hussein

"sudo sysctl -p" is used to load sysctl settings from a specified file, or /etc/sysctl.conf if you don't point it elsewhere. So you're editing sysctl.conf to change some kernel settings, then making sure it loads those new settings. "invoke-rc.d procps start" is just telling the procps service to start, which provides info on process info from the kernel. An example of what procps provides is the program "top", which will tell the most CPU intensive tasks on the system and how much processing power they're using. Looks like "60-oe-settings.conf" is just a file to make sure that your modified sysctl settings are overriding any other settings.