May 31, 2026
Memory panic at the geek disco
Re: [PATCH] OOM_pardon, a.k.a. don't kill my xlock
When your screen lock begs for mercy and the comments go feral
TLDR: A Linux developer mocked a plan to protect certain programs during memory shortages with a savage airplane-passenger-ejection analogy. The community ran with it: some demanded the "guilty" app should crash, others joked this problem has lasted forever, and one very tired user just wants Firefox gone first.
A vintage Linux mailing-list argument just resurfaced, and honestly? The comments are doing most of the heavy lifting. The original post came from developer Andries Brouwer, replying to a proposal for a special setting that basically said: please don’t shut down certain important programs, even when the computer is running out of memory. To mock the whole idea, he unleashed an all-timer analogy: an airline saves money by flying with less fuel, then solves emergencies by throwing passengers out of the plane. In his version, engineers obsess over who should be sacrificed first: the heaviest, the oldest, the poorest, maybe not the pilot. Brutal, absurd, and exactly the kind of dark nerd humor the internet loves.
And the crowd? Instant split-screen drama. One camp went full hardliner. User sedatk basically said the guilty party should take the fall: if a program asked for more memory and caused the mess, that program should crash, and critical tools should plan ahead better. Another commenter dropped the shortest, driest mic drop possible: "(2004)" — a tiny time-stamp joke that says everything about how ancient-yet-eternal this problem feels.
Then came the painfully relatable modern rage. One user groaned that it’s 2026 and they still can’t get the system to take out Firefox first, which is the most community-coded complaint imaginable. Others turned the whole thing into a meme economy, with fake "OOF insurance" jokes about never paying for ejection protection because surely it’ll never happen to them. There was even a wholesome twist: one former student popped in just to praise Brouwer as a legendary teacher. So yes, the original debate was about protecting a screen lock app — but the real spectacle is watching developers argue over which digital passenger gets tossed from the plane first.
Key Points
- •The article is a 2004 Linux kernel mailing list reply from Andries Brouwer to Thomas Habets about out-of-memory process handling.
- •Thomas Habets proposed a sysctl option to prevent specified processes from being killed during OOM conditions, even if the alternative would be a kernel panic.
- •Brouwer responded with an analogy about an airline reducing fuel loads to save money, creating occasional out-of-fuel crashes.
- •In the analogy, engineers create an 'OOF' mechanism that ejects passengers in emergencies and develop complex rules for choosing who should be ejected.
- •The analogy concludes that the mechanism sometimes activates even without a fuel shortage, illustrating criticism of elaborate OOM victim-selection logic.