Re: Out of memory killer misconfigured?

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 11:08 AM <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 04:44:36PM +0100, Tim Woodall wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Apr 2022, piorunz wrote:
>
> >
> > I look from desktop perspective. OS (Linux) runs my desktop and manage
> > all programs [...]

> Because not every machine that has the linux kernel installed runs a
> desktop [...]

As I already said: I think the OOM killer is the wrong tool for this
job. Once that fires, all bets are up. Its job is to give the sys
admin/system a chance to shut down cleanly, not much more.

I had not heard this before but...

cgroup awareness of OOM killer

Linux Kernel 4.19 (October 2018) introduced cgroup awareness of OOM killer implementation which adds an ability to kill a cgroup as a single unit and so guarantee the integrity of the workload.

That's from

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups

Of course you still need to identify and configure your cgroups effectively. It seems overdue to make the two tools cooperate but as others pointed out, they have different origins. And it's another one of those things handled differently in the data center from the desktop.

Some resource manager (ulimits, control groups [1], what have you)
seems more appropriate. It's up to the desktop environment folks
or to the sysadmin to set them up properly, of course.

As for why the OOM killer is not triggering the was piorunz expects,
no idea. The scores and the knobs to regulate them are well-known...

@piorunz: you could start the browser with a worse score so it
gets killed earlier if that suits better your use case.

Cheers
--
t