Ubuntu 26.10 adjusts OOM scores to prioritize killing applications over critical desktop services like GNOME Shell and D-Bus, disables systemd-oomd for user sessions, and provides immediate workarounds like zram and manual OOMScoreAdjust.
The article explains that out‑of‑memory (OOM) events can happen despite apparent free memory because OOM can be triggered by cgroup limits, NUMA constraints, kernel allocation failures, or systemd‑oomd policies, and it provides a step‑by‑step diagnostic method covering logs, metrics, and Kubernetes specifics.
Even when monitoring shows free memory, Linux can still kill processes due to various OOM paths such as cgroup limits, NUMA allocation failures, kernel high-order allocation issues, or systemd‑oomd, and this guide walks through a reproducible investigation and remediation process.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS enables systemd‑oomd by default, but many users report that it unexpectedly kills applications like Firefox, Chrome, and VS Code even without visible memory pressure; Canonical explains the termination conditions, highlights the swap‑size issue, and outlines planned fixes for the upcoming 22.04.1 release.
