Fedora CoreOS 45 to Enable systemd-oomd and zRAM Swap by Default

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has unanimously approved a change under which the container-oriented Fedora CoreOS system will, in version 45, enable the systemd-oomd daemon by default, along with swap on zRAM.

This decision brings CoreOS into line with the other Fedora variants, where these settings have long been standard. systemd-oomd manages memory and terminates processes preemptively when it runs low, rather than waiting for the kernel's built-in OOM killer to kick in. zRAM, meanwhile, creates a compressed swap partition directly in RAM, allowing the available resources to be used more efficiently.

Why CoreOS Held Off Until Now

The distribution was in no hurry to take this step, and for a very specific reason: for a long time, Kubernetes did not support swap on cluster nodes. Since CoreOS is aimed primarily at running containers and orchestration, enabling swap that was incompatible with Kubernetes made no sense. That situation only changed recently, which opened the way to unifying the settings.

The details of the change are laid out on the Fedora wiki.

What Else FESCo Approved

That same week, the committee approved the migration of Fedora Atomic from the legacy GTK-based Anaconda installer to the new Anaconda WebUI web interface. In addition, support for remote installation over the web was approved for the atomic desktops — an administrator will be able to deploy the system remotely, without direct access to the console.

All three decisions fit into Fedora's overall direction: gradually eliminating the inconsistencies between the distribution's variants and carrying over practices accumulated in the main branch into the specialized builds.

Source: Phoronix