3 ms·

Indeed. I think what's really needed is some way to mark pages as "required for interactivity" so that nothing related to the user interface gets paged out, eve

Indeed. I think what's really needed is some way to mark pages as "required for interactivity" so that nothing related to the user interface gets paged out, ever. That, I think, would go at least some way towards restoring the feeling of "having a computer's full attention" that we had thirty years ago.

akdev1l 8mo ago
Seems the applications can call mlockall() to do this
direwolf20 8mo ago
An Electron app would mark its entire 2GB as required for interactivity. If you run 4 electron apps on an 8GB system you run out of memory.
- robinsonb5 8mo ago
  I don't mean interactivity within apps, per se - I mean the desktop and underlying OS, so that if an electron app goes unresponsive and eats all the free RAM the window manager can still kill it. Or you can still open a new terminal window, log in and kill it. Right now it can take several minutes to get a Linux system back under control once a swapstorm starts.
  - M95D 8mo ago
    Alt+[SysRq,f] Or Alt+[SysRq,h] for help
    - dingaling 8mo ago
      No effect, captain. In 30 years of using desktop Linux I've never been able to interrupt a swapstorm. The only way out is long-press the power button.
      - M95D 8mo ago
        It always works for me, including on SBCs over TTL serial port. Always. Never had a situation where invoking the OOM killer by sysrq didn't solve the swap storm. On your system it probably doesn't work at all, not even when idle. It can only be 3 reasons: - Your kernel doesn't have it. You probably have a generic kernel provided by the package manager without this feature enabled. I can't really help you here. I always build my own kernel from source (+ patches). - Something hijacks your keyboard input. If you have a console already opened and logged in as root, you can "echo f > /proc/sysrq-trigger". Else, you can try setting up a permanent serial console and send the command from another computer. CTRL+2 then the command letter (f). The magic sysrq key over serial console is a separate kernel option that needs to be enabled. - You're doing it wrong. On laptop keyboards, keyboards less than 104/105 keys, sysrq is one of the first keys to be removed. Getting it pressed with Fn combinations... Good luck with that!
  - SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
    Linux doesn't really have any distinction between the desktop and underlying OS components in userspace and anything else in userspace. Linux is quite userland-agnostic, and distros have traditionally mixed user software with distro-managed software. You shouldn't use `sudo` to install software by default, your package manager should allow installing software for just your user. Software installed for the system could then be the only software allowed to mark itself as required for interactivity. You could do that manually to other software if you had root access, but "normal" user software installs with the package manager couldn't do so since they wouldn't get root access. That'd require some new capabilities added, and some substantial shifts in how distro maintainers & users operate, so it's extremely unlikely. It's much closer to how things like Android operate, though still not quite as secure as giving each application its own user & dedicated storage for data.
FooBarWidget 8mo ago
There is, mlock() or mlockall(), but it requires developer support. I wish there is an administrator knob that allows me to mark whole processes without needing to modify them.
- man8alexd 8mo ago
  There is cgroup memory.min

akdev1l 8mo ago

Seems the applications can call mlockall() to do this

direwolf20 8mo ago

An Electron app would mark its entire 2GB as required for interactivity. If you run 4 electron apps on an 8GB system you run out of memory.

robinsonb5 8mo ago
I don't mean interactivity within apps, per se - I mean the desktop and underlying OS, so that if an electron app goes unresponsive and eats all the free RAM the window manager can still kill it. Or you can still open a new terminal window, log in and kill it. Right now it can take several minutes to get a Linux system back under control once a swapstorm starts.
- M95D 8mo ago
  Alt+[SysRq,f] Or Alt+[SysRq,h] for help
  - dingaling 8mo ago
    No effect, captain. In 30 years of using desktop Linux I've never been able to interrupt a swapstorm. The only way out is long-press the power button.
    - M95D 8mo ago
      It always works for me, including on SBCs over TTL serial port. Always. Never had a situation where invoking the OOM killer by sysrq didn't solve the swap storm. On your system it probably doesn't work at all, not even when idle. It can only be 3 reasons: - Your kernel doesn't have it. You probably have a generic kernel provided by the package manager without this feature enabled. I can't really help you here. I always build my own kernel from source (+ patches). - Something hijacks your keyboard input. If you have a console already opened and logged in as root, you can "echo f > /proc/sysrq-trigger". Else, you can try setting up a permanent serial console and send the command from another computer. CTRL+2 then the command letter (f). The magic sysrq key over serial console is a separate kernel option that needs to be enabled. - You're doing it wrong. On laptop keyboards, keyboards less than 104/105 keys, sysrq is one of the first keys to be removed. Getting it pressed with Fn combinations... Good luck with that!
- SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
  Linux doesn't really have any distinction between the desktop and underlying OS components in userspace and anything else in userspace. Linux is quite userland-agnostic, and distros have traditionally mixed user software with distro-managed software. You shouldn't use `sudo` to install software by default, your package manager should allow installing software for just your user. Software installed for the system could then be the only software allowed to mark itself as required for interactivity. You could do that manually to other software if you had root access, but "normal" user software installs with the package manager couldn't do so since they wouldn't get root access. That'd require some new capabilities added, and some substantial shifts in how distro maintainers & users operate, so it's extremely unlikely. It's much closer to how things like Android operate, though still not quite as secure as giving each application its own user & dedicated storage for data.

FooBarWidget 8mo ago

There is, mlock() or mlockall(), but it requires developer support. I wish there is an administrator knob that allows me to mark whole processes without needing to modify them.

man8alexd 8mo ago
There is cgroup memory.min