On Mon, 18 Apr 2022, piorunz wrote:
I look from desktop perspective. OS (Linux) runs my desktop and manage all programs. When one programs eats too much memory, program gets killed. That is default behaviour or any mature operating system, even in Windows 2000 era we had this. I don't understand why Linux, using all its tools available to itself, is not handling this. I highlight tools available to it, not to me - I should not need to know which internal Linux tool kills misbehaving programs and how it works to use my desktop.
Because not every machine that has the linux kernel installed runs a desktop - or even if it does, not everybody who kicks off a long running process in the background wants that process to be killed if the system starts getting memory starved. There is no one right answer to this. If the "right way" is obvious to you in your use case then you can patch the kernel or configure the oom killer. https://www.oracle.com/in/technical-resources/articles/it-infrastructure/dev-oom-killer.html I've not read that page in detail but to summarize "if the kernel is going to kill our one critical process then we might as well reboot anyway" and explains how to make the critical process less likely to be killed. You could do the same with your desktop environment. Tim.