Systemd 247 Still Aiming To Integrate systemd-oomd

Systemd developers are still hoping to introduce systemd-oomd as part of the next release.

Systemd-oomd is the effort to provide better Linux out-of-memory / low-memory handling. Systemd-oomd is being spun from Facebook's out-of-memory daemon and adapted to not only work on Linux servers but desktops as well.

The systemd-oomd daemon polls for OOMD-enabled cgroups to monitor and will kill based on memory pressure or swap usage. The systemd-oomd behavior is configurable via a new oomd.conf file. This daemon will only kill groups if EnableOomdKill is set as obviously not wanting to kill random processes over memory use.

Per the open pull request, there is interest from upstream in having systemd-oomd ready for the upcoming systemd 247 release. Facebook's Anita Zhang commented that she should be wrapped up in making its interface more usable in the next day or so but the latest OOMD code is already good for another round of code review.

We'll keep monitoring but right now it's looking good that systemd-oomd will debut in this next version. This patch adding the documentation for the new service and configuration file spell out the capabilities of systemd-oomd in more detail.