What kernel or other settings can I set to let me keep control of my computer during a runaway process? Basically, how do I tell Linux to keep just enough resources free so I can drop into a shell terminal and figure out what's going wrong?
In context, this evening my computer hung for 30 minutes. The hard drive activity light went solid and it took about 10 minutes after hitting CTRL + ALT + F1 for a bash shell to appear. It didn't matter anyway, though, since the login process timed out if I attempted to log in. Unfortunately, there's a 30-minute gap in journalctl, so I can forget about figuring out what caused the hang or filing a bug report to the maintainers' satisfaction. Therefore, I'm more interested in keeping control of my computer in future. With thanks,
