When creating Windows to Go media under Linux the terminal application may suddenly be closed by the userspace out of memory killer (systemd-oomd) as indicated in the system logs. This happens most frequently under the GNOME desktop environment and requires the systemd-oomd service and the user environment service (user@service) to be configured with more lenient memory pressure settings. The steps below provide a guide that should be applicable to most or all Linux distributions.
- Open a terminal and enter the commands below to check the memory pressure limit and duration.
oomctlsystemd-analyze cat-config systemd/oomd.conf
- If the limit is less than 80% and the duration less than one minute these will need adjusted.
- The vendor defaults shown by the commands above can be overridden with drop-in configuration files. The first example below will configure new OOMD defaults and the second example applies to the user service configuration. Apply both if needed.
printf '[OOM]\nDefaultMemoryPressureLimit=80%%\nDefaultMemoryPressureDurationSec=60s\n' | sudo tee /etc/systemd/oomd.conf.d/override.confprintf '[Service]\nManagedOOMMemoryPressureLimit=80%%\nManagedOOMMemoryPressure=kill\n' | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/user@.service.d/override.conf
- Stop then restart the appropriate daemons as show below. The socket daemon may not be present on all distributions.
sudo systemctl stop systemd-oomd.servicesudo systemctl stop systemd-oomd.socketsudo systemctl daemon-reloadsudo systemctl start systemd-oomd.servicesudo systemctl start systemd-oomd.socket
- Enter both commands from the first step again to confirm the memory pressure limit and duration are using the new values.
- If the above change is successful the Windows to Go process should complete without issues on the next attempt.