Fedora 34 Planning To Make Use Of Systemd-OOMD To Improve Low Memory Experience

At the end of November systemd 247 released with the new Out-of-Memory Daemon (systemd-oomd) and for the Fedora 34 release next year that will likely be enabled by default for all spins.

Systemd-OOMD aims to improve the Linux low-memory / OoM experience and is based on code originally written by Facebook for their Linux servers and then adapted for Linux desktop memory pressure scenarios. Systemd-OOMD allows monitoring for resource contention and can kill opt-in processes when the memory/SWAP pressure is above a predefined threshold.

With systemd 247, the feature is considered experimental but given that Fedora 34 won't be out until the spring, the developers are confident it will be ready to shine in time. The change proposal outlines their plans for enabling systemd-oomd by default for all Fedora 34 variants. The proposal is to kill off processes under a selected cgroup when the total memory pressure on all tasks exceeds 4% for a period of 10 seconds. Swap configuration handling will also be enabled. More details on the proposed systemd-oomd integration via the proposal.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has yet to evaluate the proposal but given how they tend to always ship new systemd features quickly and Red Hat employs the key systemd developers, it's a safe bet they will approve this system-wide change for the next Fedora release.