• 2 posts
  • 31 comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: October 16th, 2025
  • Linux@lemmy.ml•Ubuntu 26.10 stops low memory from killing your desktop session - OMG! UbuntubyFishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    2 days

    sure, but how much memory? Here’s how I imagine it working (based on approximately zero knowledge):

    • OOM killer is triggered
    • The kernel code for the OOM killer (including heuristics) has to be swapped in. This code should only be a few KB at most so won’t actually take long.
    • The code has to be executed. To do so it needs to access information about all processes
    • Even if this information can be swapped out, it, likewise, is very small.

    So in my imagination it only takes two small blobs of data being swapped in - if kernel code and process information even can be swapped out; maybe it can be protected. Maybe you know something that ruins this picture though.

  • Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•*doink*byFishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    2 days

    You’re right to push back. You asked me not to whallop the baby with a bottle of champers but that’s exactly what I did. That’s not just a mistake, it’s a load bearing error and I apologize.

  • Linux@lemmy.ml•Ubuntu 26.10 stops low memory from killing your desktop session - OMG! UbuntubyFishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    2 days

    Isn’t this article essentially wrong because of this line:

    Ubuntu 26.10 also stops systemd-oomd being able to kill user sessions

    systemd-oomd works completely differently from the kernel OOM killer. Unless it’s changed, it just ranks everything by how much memory they’re using and picks the biggest memory hog that isn’t manually deprioritised by some config rule, and kills that. The OOM killer has a much smarter heuristic to deprioritise processes which are being actively used.

    As far as I understand, systemd-oomd was always a shoddy implementation because of this, and when it first started being used in Fedora (I don’t know about Ubuntu) also had insanely aggressive settings so that it would nobble something when you still had 20% free memory.

    The problem it was trying to solve was that Linux’s behaviour under memory pressure is actually abysmal. I have no idea if other OSes are any better, but basically once your computer starts thrashing, you’re better off rebooting it because it’ll be up again in a minute, whereas if you wait it’ll probably be half an hour if you’re lucky. The OOM killer detects actual out-of-memory, not thrashing, and so you can spend days slowly grinding your way through operations that should have taken seconds without ever triggering it. Hence systemd-oomd is designed to kick in before you actually run out of memory… and as a consequence it somewhat frequently does so too early.

  • Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's a scene from a video game you'll never forget? Post a screenshot.byFishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    5 days

    I’ve logged 170 hours on steam (although a chunk of that was idling I think - call it 100 at the absolute minimum)

    If you don’t enjoy the choice of rooms, the game doesn’t work, no matter how good it is. If that’s tedious, nothing will redeem it. But for me that was enough of a tactical choice that it worked.

    After that point, you need to have a flexible approach to enjoy it: for most of the game you will never have a run where you don’t accomplish something, be that seeing a new room, solving a new puzzle, or just testing a theory and eliminating a possibility. But if you go in with a singular goal, “I want to solve the puzzle in X room” you will get annoyed fast.

    The story is really good, and the way it’s gradually revealed as you solve puzzles, the way your understanding of the situation changes wholesale, is really fantastic.

    As long as the drafting is entertaining and you stay flexible, the minor issues with the game are less than negligible. Those issues are: a few mechanics should be communicated properly (most egregiously, the axe), getting around is too slow, and by the time you’re on day 100 and solving end game puzzles you need a more reliable way to reduce the rng. You end up with quite a lot of mitigation, but you need more. A once per day ability to pick a room, and a way to keep a chosen item that isn’t dependent on coat check, that you unlock after solving a mid-late game puzzle, would do the trick.

    Regarding hints, I think the best way to get hints is to find someone who’s played already so they can give you the smallest nudges possible. I regret going online for hints at times and getting a bigger one than I wanted. When I got hints from friends I was occasionally able to get… almost nothing and yet it was enough to get unstuck, which is really ideal! They’d tell me for example, “you have the right idea” and that’d just be enough for me to persist a bit more. But in general, the end game puzzles are not really designed to be solved by a single brain. Getting hints likely won’t reduce your enjoyment, because you’ll still be getting the satisfaction of solving other bits.