On Thu, Jul 18, 2024 at 05:02:03PM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
...
>
> What I wonder is how out of memory conditions are / were handled by Unix
> based operating systems. That means once swap is exhausted as well.

I wish there has a method to allocate address space without allocating memory.
The program that wants a contiguous address space could then allocate memory
into its reserved address space as needed, and it would be able to deal
with memory being unavailable just as any code could deal with malloc
returning NULL.

>
> I still got not over the fact that in Linux the out of memory killer just
> forcefully terminates processes until it is fine again.
>
> A reliable operating should never *ever* forcefully kill a process without
> the user asking it to. But as long as some apps allocate virtual address
> space as if there was no tomorrow…

I wish there *was* a way I could choose and shut down a process when I
reach the out-of-memory situation.

It's usually firefox-esr that I want to shut down. It's usually the culprit.

I can try ctrl-alt-F1 to reach a root console to use killall firefox-esr.
I don't even need root if it's my own firefox-esr.

But the machine becomes so unresponsive when it happens that it's pretty
hopeless.

There was one night I just decided to go to bed rather than wait for the
console to reapond, wait for the oom killer or reboot. I gave the
oom killer all night to do its job. But in the morning it still hadn't
recovered, whereupon I ended up doing a reboot anyway.

-- hendrik