Fedora 32 Looking At Using EarlyOOM By Default To Better Deal With Low Memory Situations

For months there has been many different discussions over the Linux desktop's poor performance when under memory pressure / out-of-memory type situations. That has resulted in some upstream work so far like GNOME GLib's GMemoryMonitor as well as discussions by distribution vendors about what solutions they could enable today to help the low memory situations. Fedora 32 could begin shipping and using EarlyOOM by default to help in this area.

Fedora developers had been figuring out ways to improve Linux interactivity in low-RAM environments. Red Hat's Chris Murphy has followed through with submitting a change proposal for Fedora 32 to install EarlyOOM by default and have it enabled. EarlyOOM is a user-space daemon for checking the amount of memory and swap frequently in order to trigger Linux's out-of-memory killer (oom-killer) sooner rather than before experiencing too much memory pressure that the Linux desktop hits responsiveness problems.

So the proposal aims to help Fedora recover from OOM situations sooner. This change would affect April's release of Fedora Workstation 32. Fedora already has the earlyoom package for those interested but this is about the default change.