251–260 of 328 posts
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Your network exposure is via the windows network stack first, then Firefox.
Most of the CVEs I've seen for that stack are in DNS, and Firefox's DNS-over-HTTPS implementation bypasses the OS DNS almost completely in sensible configurations.
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I use arch based linux. This year updates have broken video decoding twice. Font rendering once (still not fixed without manually deleting files.). And broken the whole system due to there not being a mechanism that makes sure all QT libraries upate at the same time once or twice. That is all one system. Meanwhile 4 separate windows pcs have not had problems with updates for at least 6 years
It's not fair comparing Arch and Windows as they are two very different types of OSes. Arch is bleeding edge and it is completely normal and expected to be prone to breakages. It's not meant for the average PC user, it's meant for experienced users who're comfortable with troubleshooting technical issues, reporting bugs, and know and are happy to downgrade packages/rollback to previous snapshots etc. On the upside, A…
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I stopped using swap almost a quarter of century ago, and since then I have not seen a PC with Linux freezing because of full RAM. Before the recent increase in RAM prices, it was not difficult to have a generous amount of RAM in a PC, that would make very unlikely the out-of-memory situations. When OOM really happened, it was much better to become aware of this immediately, and reduce the number of concurrent thread…
Unfortunately Linux makes it difficult to fully get away from swapping because any file-backed page is eligible to be evicted, and even if you have "disabled swap" the kernel will cheerfully page-out your program, even if it needs to be immediately paged in again to continue. The only way to stop it from doing so is to remap all executable mappings into anonymous memory, a thing which is possible but which the loader…
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Unfortunately Linux makes it difficult to fully get away from swapping because any file-backed page is eligible to be evicted, and even if you have "disabled swap" the kernel will cheerfully page-out your program, even if it needs to be immediately paged in again to continue. The only way to stop it from doing so is to remap all executable mappings into anonymous memory, a thing which is possible but which the loader…
This type of thrashing was the most common OOM issue I saw on my servers, the system would effectively deadlock until I pulled the plug. In my setup this seemed to be caused by slow-ish disks, and using a small amount of zram made things more CPU-bound / less IO-bound. I haven’t seen the problem since, the OOM killer does what I expect.
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....No. And those were not good days, unless your definition is fun is reinstalling OS
Back when updates were add on packs like Plus! they were very exciting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus !
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Which OS are you using? systemd-oomd (or similar) afaik is enabled in many modern releases and fixes it. The default settings (on Arch) make it kill stuff when your CPU is spending 60% of time on reclaiming memory over some time period. So you'll get 20 seconds of lag, then it is fixed. By killing a program, yes, but how else do you expect it to work? If your RAM is not enough you have to kill stuff. And I really dou…
> how else do you expect it to work How does it work on Windows and MacOS where I don't get the same freezes and random programs aren't killed by the OS? Because I'd expect it to work like that. There is this false dichotomy, a black and white kind of thinking on display. > And I really doubt you mean to say that Windows is _more RAM efficient_ than Linux What I'm saying ought to be clear to anyone willing to listen.…
And back when I was forced into running Windows, I used to get memory-related freezes daily. Literally daily.
So I’m really not convinced the situation is drastically different there. I mean if it were that simple, Linux would have fixed it already.
I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.
From my experience, Windows does freeze and become completely unusable too, just not usually from RAM usage hitting 100%. I don't use Windows much, nor do I care much about that environment, but from what I've seen it seems to keep RAM usage below 100% most of the time. What I do see pretty often is the drive getting stuck at 100% usage instead, which makes the whole system ridiculously unusable anyway.
Linux OOM handling is just atrocious.
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Which OS are you using? systemd-oomd (or similar) afaik is enabled in many modern releases and fixes it. The default settings (on Arch) make it kill stuff when your CPU is spending 60% of time on reclaiming memory over some time period. So you'll get 20 seconds of lag, then it is fixed. By killing a program, yes, but how else do you expect it to work? If your RAM is not enough you have to kill stuff. And I really dou…
The ideal would be to go into swap without becoming unresponsive, so that the user can quit a program of their choice to free memory. If you really want to make an issue out of it, do something like pre-X macOS, where it would provide a warning when you are getting close to running out of memory, so that a user might have the chance to do something before the current process starts getting swapped out.
Linux already does this. The issue is when your swap is full too, or you’ve exhausted your RAM at such a rapid pace that the disk IO cannot keep up with the read and writes to swap.
I’ve seen Windows choke under the same conditions too.
> do something like pre-X macOS, where it would provide a warning when you are getting close to running out of memory, so that a user might have the chance to do something before the current process starts getting swapped out.
This is where the desktop and the kernel being entirely separate organisations (not even projects, but literal organisations) makes things a touch harder. And those DEs aren’t even Linux specific either. So any tooling would have to portable (which, in fairness, should be possible with POSIX in this particular scenario).
I think KDE does provide tools here for gracefully handling memory constraints. But that’s just one desktop environment of many.
I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.
I stopped using swap almost a quarter of century ago, and since then I have not seen a PC with Linux freezing because of full RAM. Before the recent increase in RAM prices, it was not difficult to have a generous amount of RAM in a PC, that would make very unlikely the out-of-memory situations. When OOM really happened, it was much better to become aware of this immediately, and reduce the number of concurrent thread…
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I'm ashamed to daily run Ubuntu at home with Chrome (a dozen tabs), Firefox (literally hundreds of tabs, but only a few active), Thunderbird, RSSGuard, whatever I'm currently working with, and sometimes Steam and a AAA game on top of that. Never felt the need to close anything, but I must confess I have 64 Gb of RAM. At work I ran the same Firefox profile in Windows, with 16 GB of RAM, it used to eat RAM more eagerly…
Macs will compress infrequently-used memory, and of course everything will swap. So you can have tons of idle tabs that aren't using physical RAM.
I’ve found a few idle YouTube tabs is enough to bring macOS to its knees. Though I do wonder if uBlock Origin is the hidden cause rather than Firefox itself.