earlyoom VS systemE

> The system is not supposed to 'lock up' when you run out of physical RAM. If it does, something is wrong. It might become slower as pages are flushed to disk but it shouldn't be terrible unless you are really constrained and thrashing. If the Kernel still can't allocate memory, you should expect the OOMKiller to start removing processes. It should not just 'lock up'. Something is wrong.

I don't why but locking up is my usual experience for Desktop Linux for many years and distros, and I remember seeing at least one article explaining why. The only real solution is calling the OOMKiller early either with a daemon or SysRq.

> It should not take minutes. Should happen really quickly once thresholds are reached and allocations are attempted. What is probably happening is that the system has not run out of memory just yet but it is very close and is busy thrashing the swap. If this is happening frequently you may need to adjust your settings (vm.overcommit, vm.admin_reserve_kbytes, etc). Or even deploy something like EarlyOOM (https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom). Or you might just need more RAM, honestly.

Yeah. Exactly. But as the thread says, why aren't those things set up automatically?

It's not that simple: some defaults may differ, and some features may arrive at different times (if ever). For example, earlyoom has been enabled on Workstation since F32, but the KDE Plasma spin got it one release later.

Most answers will answer your question, but you can do better and avoid the freezes in the first place. IME almost every time the system froze up and didn't come back in a few seconds it was out of memory. The obvious solution is to add memory, but you can use Early OOM to kill hungry processes if you're running out of memory instead.

It sounds like you're running out of memory though, so if your OS's OOM killer isn't working as well as it should, you can try earlyoom as an alternative.

Swap is indeed supposed to prevent this AFAIK. You can though try some tools like EarlyOOM and see if it helps : https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

This was posted by someone else in the thread, but SystemE is close to that dream [1]:

> Using the tooling in this repo, I am able to boot from linux to sinit as PID1, and from there to Emacs acting as PID2 using --script mode, performing all typical rc.boot system initialization using Emacs lisp until we hit the getty.

[1]: https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE

Emacs people are the same

A bit too late now lol

I think there is one already

Replace whatever puny old init you’re using with https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE

Cool otherwise, I had some thoughts that Emacs could be used as a cron replacement, but I was never sure it would be worth it to be honest. Systemd is probably the way to go. By the way, I remember there was also a SystemE, I have never tried it, so I don't know how good it is, I totally forgot it actually until now.

Hello there