Friday 10 June 2022

Re: systemd-oomd issues on desktop

Hi,

I'm part of the team that worked on the Fedora Change Proposal that
enabled systemd-oomd by default:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/EnableSystemdOomd

Joining this discussion late, apologies - I wasn't subscribed to
ubuntu-devel prior to today, but will try to catch up on the thread on
the archive online.

I had a discussion about the lack of notification before a kill with
pabs on the debian-mentors channel recently (while packaging psi-notify
for Debian; Ubuntu PPA is here:
https://launchpad.net/~michel-slm/+archive/ubuntu/psi-notify)

(both psi-notify and systemd-oomd act on the same pressure information,
but psi-notify just notifies you when certain thresholds while oomd
kills the cgroup that causes most of the memory pressure to try and
stop
getting to a situation where the kernel does it, and likely pick a
worse
target).

pabs and I agreed that having an actionable notification prior to the
actual
kill would be an improvement, even if the process likely to be killed
might differ between the notification and the actual kill, and after
discussing this with the team, Anita published this RFC last week:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/23606

Given that we have two major distributions now shipping oomd (Fedora
and Ubuntu -- strictly in chronological order, not implying any value
judgement here), should we discuss any potential tweak / improvement
either on the GitHub issue and/or on the systemd-devel mailing list?

https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel

It will probably be good to share as much implementation details as
possible and get them applied upstream.

Best regards,

--
Michel Alexandre Salim
identities:
https://keyoxide.org/5dce2e7e9c3b1cffd335c1d78b229d2f7ccc04f2