Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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systemd 255 Released With A "Blue Screen of Death" For Linux Systems (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Um, you really need to read the entire phrase and not pick out only what you want from it. 😃

Swap can make a system slower to OOM kill, since it provides another, slower source of memory to thrash on in out of memory situations

It means that if you try to use it as a source of memory, when you run out of actual RAM it will make your system almost completely unresponsive due to disk thrash, instead of allowing the kernel to just kill the process that's eating your RAM. So you'll just end up hard-booting system.

[–] wmassingham 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes, and that's a good thing if you don't want it to start killing processes. You have that extra time/space to deal with the out-of-memory condition yourself.

Or you can ignore that condition and continue using the system in a degraded state, with swap as "disk RAM".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Like I said, the system will be almost completely unresponsive due to disk access being several orders of magnitude lower than RAM and allocation thrashing... you won't be able to do much, the mouse, keyboard and display will react extremely slowly. There may be situations where you'd prefer this to an OOM kill, for example if you're running a test or experiment where you'd rather have it finish even if it takes a very long time rather than lose the data. But if you're a regular desktop user or server admin you'll probably just reboot.