whole system can unrecoverably stall just because of a single misbehaving program that eats up too much memory (causing trashing)

[Teo]

If a single program starts misbehaving (because of an error) and suddenly eating up a lot of memory, the whole system becomes unresponsive and you won't even be able to open a terminal, or switch to a virtual terminal (ctrl+alt+f1) and kill the offending process.

It's absolutely unacceptable that the whole system can so easily stall into an unrecoverable state where the only option is a hardware shut down, just because of ONE misbehaving process (no matter whether faulty or malicious). You easily find yourself in this ridiculous and enraging situation:
- you perfectly know what program is eating up all memory and hogging the system (or you have just a couple of candidates and could easily figure out by running "top")
- you perfectly know what to do to restore normal behavior: open a terminal, ps to find out the process id, and kill it. 3 easy steps
- you can't do any of that because the system won't even respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks. Not even ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to virtual terminal works. You have no chance to run any command.

The system should stop allocating the memory that process asks, or at least always keep in physical memory the essential processes that are needed to do the necessary tasks rescue the system from such a situation: open a terminal (or at least switch to a virtual console) and run commands.
Also, responsiveness to mouse and keyboard should ALWAYS have the topmost priority, no matter what cpu-intensive or i/o-intensive task is being performed.

An operating system that becomes unworkable just because of one single program's fault, is simply failing to do its most basic job.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: linux-image-3.13.0-29-generic 3.13.0-29.53
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-29.53-generic 3.13.11.2
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-29-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.2
Architecture: amd64
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: teo 2155 F.... pulseaudio
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Tue Jun 10 19:55:17 2014
HibernationDevice: RESUME=UUID=ff7e702a-a05a-47fd-8c14-551e81f9e9e3
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-10-11 (242 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
MachineType: Acer Aspire V3-571G
ProcFB: 0 inteldrmfb
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-29-generic.efi.signed root=UUID=5830b30e-69e8-4bb4-8a2b-bc2b43c7414a ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7
RelatedPackageVersions:
 linux-restricted-modules-3.13.0-29-generic N/A
 linux-backports-modules-3.13.0-29-generic N/A
 linux-firmware 1.127.2
SourcePackage: linux
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-05-24 (17 days ago)
dmi.bios.date: 10/15/2012
dmi.bios.vendor: Acer
dmi.bios.version: V2.07
dmi.board.asset.tag: Type2 - Board Asset Tag
dmi.board.name: VA50_HC_CR
dmi.board.vendor: Acer
dmi.board.version: Type2 - Board Version
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: Acer
dmi.chassis.version: V2.07
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAcer:bvrV2.07:bd10/15/2012:svnAcer:pnAspireV3-571G:pvrV2.07:rvnAcer:rnVA50_HC_CR:rvrType2-BoardVersion:cvnAcer:ct10:cvrV2.07:
dmi.product.name: Aspire V3-571G
dmi.product.version: V2.07
dmi.sys.vendor: Acer

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

This change was made by a bot.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Teo, as per http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers an update to your BIOS is available (2.21). If you update to this following https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BiosUpdate does it change anything? If it doesn't, could you please both specify what happened, and provide the output of the following terminal command:
sudo dmidecode -s bios-version && sudo dmidecode -s bios-release-date

Please note your current BIOS is already in the Bug Description, so posting this on the old BIOS would not be helpful.

For more on BIOS updates and linux, please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs#Bug_reporting_etiquette .

Thank you for your understanding.

[Teo (teo1978)]

Do you really think this may even remotely be related to the bios?!? Or are you going to reject every bug report that is reported with a non-latest bios?

I really need to know that, because if it is the latter, then I'll stop wasting my time reporting bugs and trying to make ubuntu better, as I'm obviously not going to update the bios when Ubuntu doesn't provide an easy way to do it and the link yoy point to only provides downloads for windows.

It seems to me that it is completely obvious here that the issue is in the way the OS manages memory.
Also, the bug should be pretty straight-forward to reproduce on ANY machine, so if you have a machine with the bios updated, you should be able to try yourself by doing the following:
- have a multi-gigabyte SVG file
- try to open it in eog
and see if that reproduces the issue.

BTW Note that whether the bug report is incomplete or not, "importance low" is very wrong.

[Teo (teo1978)]

Ah, and from the bug reporting etiquette link:
"Before filing any HARDWARE RELATED reports on Launchpad, please update your BIOS" (emphasys added).

This does not seem to me a hardware related issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]