[systemd-devel] system-wide MemoryMax - possible?

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

On 2019-03-18 18:59, Lennart Poettering wrote:

>> I.e. a desktop system where user opens several browsers, with too many 
>> tabs
>> with too many memory-intensive pages - becomes unresponsive for long
>> minutes, before OOM-killer finally kills the offender.
> 
> Quite frankly, this sounds like somehting where you want to tweak the
> OOM killer, instead of making memory even scarcer...

Indeed.

However - there aren't really too many tunables for OOM killer, and 
playing with /proc/$PID/oom_adj in a dynamic environment requires 
something like the mentioned oomd.

Or in other words: given that a system has X MB memory, please configure 
it so that all non-root userspace processes can't use more than X - Y MB 
(where Y MB is memory left to root processes). As this seems to be the 
only way for a Linux system not to freeze for some time if some 
userspace misbehaves and wants to consume too much memory.


Tomasz Chmielewski