After seven months of development the release of the background process , which periodically checks the available memory (MemAvailable, SwapFree) and attempts to respond at an early stage to memory shortages.
If the amount of available memory is below a specified value, earlyoom forcibly (by sending SIGTERM or SIGKILL) terminates the process that is consuming the most memory (the one with the highest value in /proc/*/oom_score), without allowing the system to reach a state where its buffers are cleared and hindering swap operation (the OOM (Out Of Memory) handler in the kernel is triggered when the memory shortage condition has already reached critical levels and usually by that point the system is unresponsive to user actions).
Earlyoom supports sending notifications about forcibly terminated processes to the desktop (using notify-send), and also provides the ability to define rules where process names can be specified using regular expressions for which termination is preferred (the "--prefer" option) or should be avoided (the "--avoid" option).
Key changes in the new release:
- Implemented waiting for the process to complete after sending it a signal. This eliminates the problem where earlyoom sometimes kills more than one process when just one would suffice;
- An auxiliary script (notify_all_users.py) has been added to notify all logged-in users of process termination via notify-send;
- Fixed incorrect display of some process names containing UTF-8 characters;
- A code of conduct (Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct) has been adopted.
Source: opennet.ru
