Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:02 UTC (Fri) by deater (subscriber, #11746)In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by wnowak1
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
> citizen but the point is that to ding Linux because a
> userspace application is killed while running out of memory
> on a low end system is a bit unfair.
You are misunderstanding. I *wish* the OOM killer would kick in and kill firefox. What happens on my machine is that once the system hits OOM conditions, the desktop soft-locks, sometimes for over 30 minutes, with the system unresponsive.
Sometimes if I hit control-alt-f1 fast enough it will eventually (maybe after 5 minutes) switch to a console window where I can kill firefox manually if I've left a logged in root console there.
This is not disk thrashing, I have swap turned off as I have an SSD drive.
Linux is completely failing in this case, and it's bad enough that after 23 years of Desktop Linux use I'm considering switching to something else.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:12 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Well, that's heavily exacerbating your problem...
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:17 UTC (Fri)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (1 responses)
As I see it, Linux is not optimized for any desktop hardware. It's optimized for servers. In fact, over the years, it has become more and more desktop-hostile, to mention anti-features pushed on us by enterprise distros such as the "predictable" network interface names as one example. That is why people who used it on desktop for years are switching away -- because they don't see any future in it, any light at the end of the tunnel.
But there's no convincing some people that there is a problem.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 23:56 UTC (Fri)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:29 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link] (1 responses)
You should consider enabling swap.
"A swap file is space on a hard disk used as the virtual memory extension of a computer's real memory (RAM). Having a swap file allows your computer's operating system to pretend that you have more RAM than you actually do."
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:31 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link]
Posted Sep 23, 2019 19:56 UTC (Mon)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (5 responses)
And that's *far* more likely to kill your SSD.
Posted Sep 23, 2019 20:03 UTC (Mon)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (4 responses)
Yes, clean pages will be dropped more often, requiring them to be read again from files in /usr when they are needed, as you said, but nothing will be written there, so his SSD will be just fine.
Posted Sep 23, 2019 20:34 UTC (Mon)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (3 responses)
Most pages of demand-paged executables are clean. Without swap configured, all the system can do is discard random pages of an executable (or any other file-backed mmap area) in the knowledge that it can page those back in from the source file as required.
All you do by removing swap is force the system to page out file-backed mmap pages such as executable code in preference to anonymous pages; this is often not what you really want, as paging out a small amount of anonymous data that's not been used in a while can be enough to permit the system to exit paging thrash. See Chris Down's essay in defence of swap for more details on why swap is needed.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 9:12 UTC (Tue)
by james (subscriber, #1325)
[Link] (2 responses)
However, it is erases that wear out an SSD. If you are configuring your system solely to minimise SSD wear, many reads from /usr are far less harmful than one write to swap.
Of course, if you are optimising a system solely to minimise SSD wear, why not get rid of the SSD altogether and go back to spinning rust? We normally buy SSD-based systems for performance reasons; it seems inconsistent to then not take performance into account when configuring it.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 12:44 UTC (Tue)
by deater (subscriber, #11746)
[Link] (1 responses)
anyway, thanks everyone for quoting the wikipedia page on swap files to me, believe it or not I know what they are, how they work, and I have even written my own VM-enabled custom operating system before.
> why not get rid of the SSD altogether and go back to spinning rust?
Sure, next time I rip open this 5-year old macbook air for maintainence maybe I'll shove in some huge 5400rpm 3 1/2" drive. Maybe I'll also solder in some DIMM slots so people can stop accusing me of not having enough RAM.
Really, if your operating system is so poorly written it can't run in 4GB on a multi-gigahertz machine, maybe you need to step back and re-evaluate your coding a bit.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 13:21 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
...In other words, you deliberately and knowingly chose to mis-configure a system designed around overcommit of memory in a way that causes it to break on your particular application workload?
> Really, if your operating system is so poorly written it can't run in 4GB on a multi-gigahertz machine, maybe you need to step back and re-evaluate your coding a bit.
Just FYI, passive-aggressive insults are not the way to get folks to care about your self-made predicament. You may want to step back and re-evaluate your approach.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
You are wasting your time. He will try to tell you, as he already did, that there are all those /proc or /sys files you can tweak to make OOM behave better and that it's your fault that Linux is not optimized for your low-end hardware.Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
What you write is correct (to the best of my knowledge).
SSDs, erasing, and wear rates.
SSDs, erasing, and wear rates.
SSDs, erasing, and wear rates.