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what behavior would you like to see when primary memory is under extreme pressure?

See mac or windows: grow swap automatically up to some sane limit, show a warning, give user an option to kill stuff; on headless systems, kill stuff. Do not page out critical system processes like sshd or the compositor.

A hard lock which requires a reboot or god forbid power cycling is the worst possible outcome, literally anything else which doesn’t start a fire is an improvement TBH.

> A hard lock which requires a reboot or god forbid power cycling is the worst possible outcome

Hilariously this happens on windows too.

Actually everything you said windows and mac doesn't do they do, if you put on a ton a memory pressure the system becomes unresponsive and locks up...

I've OOMd on my mac several times, and it has never gone completely unresponsive.

You get an OOM dialog with a list of apps that you can have it kill.

I feel I just need to run a slightly too large LLM with too much context on a MBP, and it's enough to slow it down irreparably until it suddenly hard resets. Maybe the memory pressure it does that at is much higher though compared to Linux?

Same as Windows. Instead the system freezes.

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