[systemd-devel] is the watchdog useful?

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:50:44 +0000
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:

> In principle, the watchdog for services is nice. But in practice it seems
> be bring only grief. The Fedora bugtracker is full of automated reports of ABRTs,
> and of those that were fired by the watchdog, pretty much 100% are bogus, in 
> the sense that the machine was resource starved and the watchdog fired.

Hi,

just curious, is that resource starvation caused by something big, e.g.
a browser, using too much memory which leads to the kernel reclaiming
also pages of program text sections because they can be reloaded from
disk at any time, however those pages are needed again immediately
after when some CPU core switches process context, leading to something
that looks like a hard freeze to a user, while the kernel is furiously
loading pages from disk just to drop them again, and can take from
minutes to hours before any progress is visible?

It has happened to me on Fedora in the past. I could probably dig up
discussions about the problem in general if you want, they explain it
better than I ever could.

Does Fedora prevent that situation by tuning some kernel knobs nowadays
for desktops?


Thanks,
pq
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