this is the first time in many years of my GNU/Linux journey that I saw a BSOD. on my office machine BTW. personal machine has never crashed even once.
the crash was due to 100% RAM and swap usage.
image description:
a mobile-clicked photo of a laptop screen. the background is full black with a sad computer image in the middle. the text below it reads: “Oh no! something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. Please log out and try again.”
just below it is a small button with the text “log out”
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You’ve been gnomed
Who uses ram anyway. Go buy yourself an HDD of 12TB of swap partition
Cloud is the future. Mount Google Drive as your swap
Oh shit guys we just downloaded more RAM
What if they have more than one pc? Are they supposed to buy a harddrive for each?
Get yourself a NAS and use that for swap, much easier to share between devices!
The cool part is, the kernel and most of the user space is still running fine, so there’s no restart required (although I would anyway), it’s just gnome is having issues.
I’ve had dodgy hardware cause a kernel panic, which is much more equivalent to a Windows BSOD.
I think I made it work too much. i’m running 23.10(non-LTS), hadn’t shut it down for weeks, and was hoarding close to 200 tabs. furthermore, I had 3-4 electron-based applications open.
That’s not a problem. Especially because modern tabs hibernate. Linux can go forever without restarting, to the point where there are multiple services cropping up that let you upgrade your kernel while it’s running, so you never have to reboot (mostly, in some edge cases it’s still recommended to reboot).
Failed to allocate 17.3 TiB of memoryThat’s not a blue screen, that’s a boo screen
100% RAM is a huge pain on Linux. I have a widget in my taskbar that always shows my RAM usage so I can tell if I’m about to get doinked
There are automated memory killers that should avoid this. I’m using nohang, but systemd also has some module for this.
Doesn’t Linux have some sort of Page File?
Its not a dedicated file usually as you can setup a swap partition.
Technically you can create a fixed size pagefile in your disk and mount it as swap workout repartitioning. But Linux doesn’t use swap much regardless of method.
It only uses swap under memory pressure. You can configure your swappyness if you want it to be more aggressive
Same, what usually spikes yours to 100%?
Up until yesterday I would’ve said “Firefox” (because I hoard tabs), but it turns the real answer was “Firefox running as a Snap.”
(A failed update screwed up my Snap installation, which finally gave me the kick I needed to quit procrastinating and excise it from my system once and for all. I’m running Firefox installed via apt package from Mozilla’s PPA, and now – with the same number of tabs open – my system is hovering around 8 GB memory usage, when before it was constantly bouncing off the 32 GB redline.)
Firefox somewhat regularly crashes or freezes up my laptop (16Gb) due to memory usage and I’m running the default Arch package. I ended up installing a memory watchdog that kills processes when they start using too much. Although I do hoard tabs.
I mean there is a kernel OOM killer and a systemd service that acts well before that. Do you not use systemd?
I do use systemd. I pretty much run stock EndeavorOS
