Files
cozystack/docs/operations
Myasnikov Daniil ca7d2b0182 docs(platform): explain system component memory limits
Add docs/operations/system-memory-limits.md, recording why system
components carry memory limits. That reasoning is not recoverable from
the values themselves, and is exactly the kind of thing a well-meaning
later change removes as redundant.

The Talos userspace OOM handler (v1.12+, enabled by default) selects
its victim by ranking cgroups that lack memory.max. Three consequences
are each easy to get wrong on their own: only a limit grants immunity,
since a request merely moves BestEffort to Burstable and under
strictCgroupClassOrdering that means "killed second"; every container
in the pod needs one, init containers included, because kubelet sets
pod-level memory.max only when all of them have it; and PriorityClass,
system-node-critical included, has no bearing on it whatsoever,
because the handler walks cgroupfs and holds no Kubernetes client.
That last one is the trap, since setting a priority looks like a fix.

The page also covers the two installer knobs and the constraint that
makes them dangerous to lower (a defaulted limit below a container's
own request fails admission), how to confirm a pod cgroup really
carries memory.max rather than trusting the QoS class, what is
deliberately left uncovered, and how to relax the global-PSI backstop
clause of the trigger on a cluster that trips it persistently.

Every Talos claim is checked against the siderolabs/talos v1.13.6 tag,
which is the version packages/core/talos currently ships, and every
Cozystack claim against the tree.

Ordering: this documents behaviour introduced by the system-namespace
LimitRange and the node-DaemonSet resource changes, so it should not
merge ahead of them.

Signed-off-by: Myasnikov Daniil <myasnikovdaniil2001@gmail.com>
2026-08-13 16:29:48 +05:00
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