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I have been trying Ubuntu for about a year now, taking a break from BSD. This is the longest I have ever used Linux continuously for personal use. I always wo
by 3xblah 7y ago
I have been trying Ubuntu for about a year now, taking a break from BSD. This is the longest I have ever used Linux continuously for personal use.
I always work entirely in RAM. Everything is mounted tmpfs. Occasionally I accidentally exceed the amount of RAM I have available. Some file grows too large.
One of the things I always liked about BSD was how well it handled this situation.^1 It had no lasting effect on the operation of the OS. The only things affected were running applications that needed write space. Thus all I had to worry about were the running daemons I use that are continuously writing to logs. The OS would otherwise continue to function.
Whereas when I run out of space in a tmpfs-mounted directory in Ubuntu, I get filesystem errors. I cannot simply remove the excessively large file, and expect to continue to work indefinitely. I get I/O errors. I am eventually forced to reboot. Obviously I am not well-versed on Linux but as far as I can tell so far, this is a known problem.
1. This was NetBSD but I assume that FreeBSD and OpenBSD would be no different.
- alcover 7y agoThank you for mentioning this. As someone interested also in RAM-only, that is a strong additional point for BSD.
- aruggirello 7y agoYes, this is a known problem for Linux desktop, and the upcoming EarlyOOM monitor is designed precisely to detect such OOM situations and handle them better, avoiding system unresponsiveness etc. But maybe it's not yet ready for prime time. Fedora was about to add EarlyOOM in the 32 release, but they'll probably defer this until at least 33: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-FESCo-Defers-EarlyOOM https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-F...
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoHm yeah, i recall NetBSD to be 'unbreakable' in that, and some other ways from personal experiences in the past.* Anyways, there are Linux distros who specialize in this use case, and have sane and proven defaults tuned for that. Sometimes they seem a little bit 'ghettoish', but one can remove anything which is unnecessary, add needed stuff, even remaster in RAM and then rewrite that to another boot media. Or being lazy and just using an overlay to the stock image. [1] https://antixlinux.com/ https://antixlinux.com/ for instance works very well. [2] http://grml.org/ http://grml.org/ is another Debian based one, altough a little bit lagging behind nowadays. But many others also. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_th... Ubuntu is not a good starting point for that use case. * Like carefully unplugging the SCSI controller from the running system, while it had no other available mass storage, watching the console being flooded with messages akin to 'Arrgh! I'm dying! Where is my...?', carefully reinserting the controller into the PCI-slot without causing shorts, console turning back to normal. And switching back to the running X as if nothing had happened. (And no file system damage in spite of having soft updates on UFS active, and running tasks with many open files) Amazing.