Freeze prevention prevents nearly all computer freezes, by reserving a little amount of resources to the system. It is enabled by default, but it can be disabled during installation process or from the control panel.
The system forbids applications to access a fixed amount of RAM, called the freeze prevention resource (FPR), which is by default the smallest between 1% of the total RAM and 8 megabytes.
When more than 99% of CPU and/or RAM is used, the system puts itself in freeze prevention mode (FPM), which consists in listening to a specific keyboard shortcut (by default, Ctrl+Alt+P
), controllable using the keyboard or the mouse (with a special block cursor, not changeable by applications) which asks user if they want to terminate gently the more resources-consuming application instance (by sending the TERMINATE
signal), to kill it, to kill all instances of the application, or to see the list of running application instances with how much resources they consume, to make a choice on another one.
If developer mode is enabled, another option is added to access a tiny shell containing a set of commands made to list and manage running applications in a more powerful way.