In theory this should be possible with cgroups. The mechanism is there but I don’t know of a way to easily set up a policy that does what you want. It should b

In theory this should be possible with cgroups. The mechanism is there but I don’t know of a way to easily set up a policy that does what you want. It should be possible to allocate say 95% of the system resources to the default cgroup and then you could create a secondary cgroup — recovery — which has access to the last 5% of the system resources which you could use to run commands such as “kill” or “top” to recover the system state. Additionally you could run a second ssh server in the recovery cgroup which you could ssh into in the case of system lock up. In reality it is probably easier to just reboot in most cases, or if you are dealing with servers use ipmi.