Same experience here. Linux admin. I’d absolutely love to be told I’m holding it wrong, but all I can see is that there’s no way to hold it right.

Your consternation is seconded.

It’s even worse than that… you can hard lock a system with significant freeable memory left if you have insane vm.dirty_* settings (which is of course the case by default)

The two mitigations are to: - (somewhat counterintuitively) have swap enabled - run something like earlyoom to stop the system from reaching a low-RAM situation in the first place.