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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Look into earlyoom or systemd-oomd, the kernel out-of-memory killer will only start killing processes way after it should be. It will happily deadlock itself in a memory swap loop before considering killing any process.

    There are a lot of other ways to fine tune the kernel to prevent this, but it’s a good starting point to prevent your system from freezing. Just keep in mind it will kill processes when memory is running out until enough memory is available.



  • As someone who had a mildly unpleasant interaction with kernel folks, I can totally understand the issue.

    This is one of the very few open source projects I had the feeling they don’t appreciate new contributers. There is no on boarding material available and picking the wrong subproject mailing list results in being ignored. You have to spend days without any possibility of help and if your are lucky you get mentioned as a reporter. For the next issue you start from square one as there was no guidance, so you could only learn the bare minimum.

    So yeah, his patch may be underwhelming. But the help and credit he got for days or weeks of unpaid work was basically nothing. You may be okay with spending days and only getting credits for the bug report, but I suspect many aren’t and will not contribute again after such an experience. And post like this try to point out the issue they have and why many people won’t contribute to the kernel ever again.