this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Never OOM again (files.catbox.moe)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

t

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In case anyone is curious if this would work, LTT tried it: https://youtu.be/minxwFqinpw

[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (2 children)

spoilers for how it works in the video:


Sadly it just crashes immediately because Google has measures in place to prevent this behavior, and the rest of the video is an ELI5 on swap space.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! I hate watching a whole video for something that could be a paragraph at most.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, the video covers a lot more than just that answer.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very much possible, but I'm aware of what swap is and how does it work. That's my problem with videos in general - if it was an article, I can easily skim through the parts I know and read only parts that interest me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I totally understand. Articles are much better at actually finding information. Videos are more entertaining though. There's nothing in that video that really couldn't have been in an article.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thank you! I was curious but not ten-minute-video curious. I wonder if there's a cloud provider that doesn't block this sort of usage - could it work with onedrive/dropbox/etc?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The video also explains why it doesn't really work; the latency is so large, the system is better off getting the files from local storage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I kind of assumed that haha, this wouldn't be something you'd do for practical purposes. Still fun though!

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah, leak all swapped data into their cloud * shiver *

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're right, we should add an encryption step as well!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Furiously sets up a LUKS swap partition on Google Drive

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

this hurts my brain

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

My ISP: what a wonderful thing you have there. I will definitely not charge you an arm and a leg for the bandwidth

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Will kind-of-work for users with gigabit+ links, actually.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It really doesn't ...the latency is sooo bad

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's why "kind-of-work".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like speaking third most Italian.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

If it quacks, walks like a duck and looks like a duck - then it is a duck.

If it mounts like swap and you can use it as swap - then it is a swap space.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I vaguely recall that Linux has support for multiple tiers of paging space, with you able to assign priority.

googles

Yeah, swapon has a -p parameter`.

https://linux.die.net/man/8/swapon

-p, --priority priority
    Specify the priority of the swap device. priority is a value between 0 and 32767. Higher numbers indicate higher priority. See swapon(2) for a full description of swap priorities. Add pri=value to the option field of /etc/fstab for use with swapon -a.

So you shovel the priority below your local paging space, might be okay for some workloads.

I dunno if there's any system to predictively migrate data between tiers of paging space, though. If it only pulls into main memory from low-priority paging space and does so a page at a time, that's gonna be painful.

Also, this definitely increases the security risks associated with having sensitive material being paged out beyond the usual "someone might get your laptop and look at the paging space when it's off if the paging space isn't encrypted and you're using software that doesn't lock security-critical data in memory" stuff.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Not at all, it's way too slow.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

is that a whole petabyte of swap???

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

That's one way of making your temp memory even slower.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

could the filesystem driver get evicted to swap?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

could the filesystem driver get evicted to swap?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nope, it's always in memory (while module is loaded).

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