I have 3 machines with clean F37 installs. One of the F37 machines has 4GB of RAM, and I
maintain it as a backup and normally only log in via ssh and do dnf updates via command
line. In the last few weeks this has become extremely difficult to do due to being
automatically logged out, presumably by systemd-oomd. It happens even if I boot in
multiuser, which ought to reduce memory use. From what little I've read and what
experimentation I've done so far, it appears that being logged into a DE (maybe only
GNOME or KDE?) protects against this, but non-DE logins (including ssh), and any commands
running in them, are not protected. This goes against the expectation that non-DE access
should be LESS likely to run out of memory, especially if there isn't even a DE
running. How hard would it be for systemd-oomd to be configured to protect non-DE logins
and anything running in them?
I've also read that configuring non-zram swap might be a cure. As I said, these are
clean F37 installs, and if that's necessary for reasonable behavior when there's
not enough RAM, the installer should be doing it automatically. In my case, I don't
think that's the cause, since the free command suggests that I'm only using a
fraction of both the memory and swap even when the automatic logging out is happening.