desktop entry proposal: TerminateSafe=true key

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Lennart Poettering <mzkqt at 0pointer.de> wrote:

>> In this scheme apps aren't asked.  Obviously we should terminate the
>> least-recently-used apps from the user who has been inactive the
>> longest.
>
> Well I am sure the kernel people think differently about that.

Why?  Don't get me wrong, I don't think that's the best heuristic ever
conceived.  To a large extent, I think we need to make some rough
attempts and see what actually works in the field.

I'm actually not opposed to simply having TerminateSafe=true be pushed
down into the kernel by the userspace, and not have it ever SIGKILL
anything.  We could dynamically adjust the oom_adj value based on how
recently the user interacted with an app, etc.

But at the same time, the shell should be involved if something is
terminated; we need to somehow explain to the user what happened.
This will probably need to go down into heuristics - is it that the
user is running too many apps?  Or that one app is using too much?
Etc.