The systemd-oomd backstop added in the previous commit is INERT on this box.
oomd's memory-pressure kill only acts on cgroups doing active reclaim (pgscan
rising); with MemorySwapMax=0 + anonymous agent memory there is nothing to
reclaim, so pgscan stays 0 and oomd never fires. Proven live: a cgroup held at
96-99% memory.pressure for >70s with pgscan=0 was never killed (oomctl + balloon).
The very swap=0 that kills the IO storm also neuters oomd.
Replace it with earlyoom, which watches free RAM (MemAvailable%) and is
swap-independent: SIGTERM the biggest task at 5%, SIGKILL at 3%, swap ignored
(-s 100). It --avoids sshd/systemd/dockerd/containerd/t3-dispatch/tmux (the
admin's way in always survives) and --prefers the agent/browser hogs. Verified
via --dryrun: fires on the RAM threshold and selects a chrome process, not a
protected daemon.
The per-cgroup caps (MemoryHigh=12G/MemoryMax=16G/MemorySwapMax=0 per user,
docker.slice 8G) are unchanged and remain the PRIMARY guard — earlyoom is the
aggregate net for the rare all-users-maxed case. systemd-oomd purged; its config
+ ManagedOOM drop-ins removed. Post-mortem updated with the finding.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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