systemd-oomd Looks Like It Will Come Together For systemd 247

Written by Michael Larabel in systemd on 13 July 2020 at 09:39 AM EDT. 91 Comments
SYSTEMD
With systemd 246 releasing soon, it looks like the new out-of-memory daemon will be merged shortly afterwards in allowing sufficient time for testing ahead of systemd 247.

Systemd-oomd is the out-of-memory daemon developed by Facebook and systemd developers. They are aiming for this to be better Linux handling of out-of-memory / low memory situations. Facebook originally wrote their OOMD code for their servers and since then has continued to be refined and adapted so it works out equally as well on desktops and more.

Systemd-oomd polls systemd for OOMD-enabled cgroups to monitor them and kill based on memory pressure or swap usage. The systemd-oomd behavior is controlled via a new oomd.conf configuration file. Cgroups will need to employ EnableOomdKill if they want to be killed when under pressure.

Going back to March has been pull request 15206 with the work-in-progress systemd-oomd code. Recently there has been an uptick in revisions to the code.


Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of Red Hat's systemd team commented this weekend, "Sorry for dropping the ball on this one. Let's get this done! It all seems fairly reasonable. I think we could merge this after the next release to give it a while to iron out any wrinkles." Following that were also various code review comments.

With systemd 246 seeing its first release candidate soon and should be shipping shortly, systemd-oomd is likely to be one of the first major features to expect out of systemd 247. Fedora has already expressed interest in potentially utilizing systemd-oomd once it's shipping in released form and other distributions are likely to follow.
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