#1107306 xfce4: xfce + systemd kill user slice on out of memory

Package:
xfce4
Source:
xfce4
Submitter:
Andrew
Date:
2025-06-05 10:01:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1107306#5
Date:
2025-06-05 08:54:13 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

My whole xfce session is occasionally killed by systemd under memory pressure
(eg excessive firefox memory usage, but whole session is killed).

This seems to happen even with systemd-oomd not installed.

This also appears to be related to xfce not being aware of cgroups. (
https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/-/issues/136 )

A supposed workaround is to set DefaultOOMPolicy=continue in
/etc/system/systemd.conf

( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25376#issuecomment-1848318046 )

I'm not sure of any other side effects of this change.

(Losing all running apps, plus terminals, context etc is extremely annoying)

Offending line in the journal -> systemd[1613]: session.slice: A process of
this unit has been killed by the OOM killer.