"le9" Strives To Make Linux Very Usable On Systems With Small Amounts Of RAM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "le9" Strives To Make Linux Very Usable On Systems With Small Amounts Of RAM

It's well known that the Linux desktop can be quite unbearable when under heavy memory pressure as has been showcased over the years and more attention these days turning to the likes of OOMD/systemd-oomd and other alternatives to better deal with Linux low/out-of-memory scenarios especially with today's desktop software and web browsers consuming increasing amounts of memory. Another effort coming to fruition for helping this scenario is the "le9" Linux kernel patches...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=le9-Linux-Low-RAM

[bple2137]

It's good to hear! I think that amount of memory we use today is absurd. I got a new machine in my job recently and I was like... why would I need 32GB of RAM for Vim, web browser and maybe few VMs?
I saw a sticker with Windows logo on the bottom - oh, I get it

Anyway it's always good to utilize old hardware until it works.

[perpetually high]

I've been using this patch!! =) Works on 5.4 LTS too. I didn't know about the le9db GitHub repo.

Sorry if I'm being annoying- but within the past week, I've been tweaking some heavy kernel config settings (and this was already after tons and tons of tweaking) and I added a bunch of new zen/cfs/xanmod tweaks, and my god, my system is FLYING. The 5.4 LTS kernel is a big part of this too if you're on older hardware like Polaris, give it a shot.

I might make a guide soon. Sirlucjan, xanmod, these guys are all providing some excellent patches to make the kernel lightening fast. And of course Michael for giving the 4-1-1. I appreciates.

[ezst036]

I saw a sticker with Windows logo on the bottom - oh, I get it

There are corporations out there in their 2-3 year refresh cycles beginning to throw computers out to e-waste with 16-32 GB of memory in them.

Its crazy.

And Windows 11 is going to (at least in the current generation of hardware now existing) accelerate this rush to new hardware with a large amount of machines that will go out to e-waste and not be used despite having plenty of usable life left in them. These are not sluggish nor ancient machines.

[obri]

I read IE9 first and was confused

[HyperDrive]

I fail to see how this hack is better than setting swappiness to 200 (which biases reclaim heavily towards swap instead of page cache eviction), page-cluster to 0 (no read-ahead), and using zram with zstd compression.

[intelfx]

I fail to see how this hack is better than setting swappiness to 200 (which biases reclaim heavily towards swap instead of page cache eviction), page-cluster to 0 (no read-ahead), and using zram with zstd compression.

This hack (while still basically a hack) is significantly more precise and self-contained than your hack which involves tuning several unrelated knobs with very wide area of effect.

[hakavlad]

le9 maintainer here, ask any questions.

[hakavlad]

I fail to see how this hack is better than setting swappiness to 200 (which biases reclaim heavily towards swap instead of page cache eviction), page-cluster to 0 (no read-ahead), and using zram with zstd compression.

This not fix the problem: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

le9 can fix this problem: https://youtu.be/iU3ikgNgp3M - The Linux (with le9 patch) kernel's ability to gracefully handle memory pressure. Boot with mem=4G, no swap space, opening chromium tabs, no hangs. The killer comes without delay.

[HyperDrive]

This not fix the problem: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

So you hit a VM corner case which manifests itself when there's no swap. I use swap on zram on all of my systems (no swap to rust/SSD, ever, even on machines with less than 2 GiB or RAM) and I've never, ever, seen the issue you describe in that email (I've seen oom kills, but hey, resources aren't infinite). To me, the solution is obvious: enable swap. No need to hack the kernel until a proper solution is found.