This is only a viable answer when overcommit is disabled. The problem comes when overcommit is enabled and you find yourself in a position where many programs think they already have memory and yet there is none to give them. If you simply kill the first piece of code that encounters the end of available memory you might take down anything including the kernel itself.

Nothing like statically allocating memory can work when overcommit is enabled because the kernel is free to compress memory, page it out and etc. and then murder you the next time you try to perform any operation that it doesn't have the space for, no matter how safe and static your initialization was.

Note that overcommit is very useful in many cases including the ones where swap saves the stability of the system under conditions that would otherwise completely lock up or panic, so it's also not viable to just prevent it from being used.

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6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OOM killer always felt like a band-aid on a severed artery to me. I've rarely seen a machine that got into OOM state really recover without a full reboot.

	▲	sph 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why would a system break if you SIGKILL a process? I’ve seen plenty of server log with OOM killing mariadb processes, and then being restarted automatically by systemd, often with no one noticing if not days later. The thing that bogs down systems and often makes them unrecoverable is when a memory hungry process starts swapping. Good luck trying to SSH in. Swap is such a silly idea on servers - good to deal with pages no one accesses, catastrophic when you’re out of RAM and memory latencies suddenly become 4 or 5 orders of magnitude slower.

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sedatk 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m not against taking down the kernel if the situation is that catastrophic. Better than killing the lock screen for sure.

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josefx 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Shouldn't desktop environments detect if a lock screen terminated abnormaly anyway? The OOM killer is just one of many possible causes.

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LoganDark 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

IMO if the security of a system depends on the lock screen not crashing then the system is not very secure. Security protocols should never fail open like that; a lock screen should never simply be a layer on top of the authenticated desktop. Windows and macOS get this right. I believe Wayland display managers are also able to get this right (but I haven't checked).

	▲	yjftsjthsd-h 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, Wayland should fix this. Granted, then you have a locked screen that the user may or may not be able to unlock, which is awkward if better.