Years ago I would have this issue on my Acer desktop-- 24 GB of RAM with a hard drive, 4-core 3 GHz CPU, and swap enabled. I'd start some memory- hungry program and within seconds everything would slow to a crawl; zero mouse movement, no response to Ctrl-Alt-F2, SysRq hotkeys, or even NumLock. I'd wait 2-5 hours and give up, thinking maybe it was a fluke.
It wasn't. I switched distros and replaced the HDD with an NVMe drive, tried disabling swap and changing VM settings, switched to a low-latency kernel, and installed more RAM to no improvement. One too many Chrome tabs, one overzealous Blender render, or a single type-o in my Minecraft server properties, and I'd sooner reboot, redo all the work that was unsaved, and get a good night's rest before the kernel got around to killing processes. Maybe it was just that kernel version or motherboard or CPU? Nope. Fast-forward to today, and I'm sitting in front of a machine with 64 gigabytes of 3200 MHz RAM, an NVMe drive with read/write speeds on the order of 1000s of MB/s, and a 16-thread 4.5 GHz processor that are currently all rendered as useless to me as a misshapen lump of dusty silicon. My mistake (about two hours ago now) was running a CFD simulation with one of a few dozen relevant values set one increment too large. Imagine my surprise when I find a thread for this widely known, easily reproducible, Linux-specific torment that is not 2 years old or 5 or even 15, but has been a continual stream of experiences like mine lasting longer than I've been able to use a mouse. I don't devote time to whining on random forums about some niche feature that I think is overdue, but when everyone's computers are constantly at risk of being transformed into hot, loud bricks until somebody pulls the plug, I can't help but question how this isn't a high enough priority to get fixed within the time it takes for a babbling infant to be considered a legal adult. Today it was Linux Mint 21.1 on 5.15.0-140-generic, if specificity yields any ethos. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/159356 Title: When DMA is disabled system freeze on high memory usage To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/159356/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
