Did you know that Linux has this special note of “root reserved space” specifically for situations like this? And the same way, there is per-process “oom_adj” which can be used to control OOM killer priority, to spare the system processes.
This problem has been solved, multiple times. Of course many distributions fail to mark appropriate processes as system, so they fail anyway, but this is just a bug, not an a glaring design omission.
This problem has been solved, multiple times. Of course many distributions fail to mark appropriate processes as system, so they fail anyway, but this is just a bug, not an a glaring design omission.