I use fedora on a 11ish year old laptop(It had decent specs for its time).
recently i encountered an issue while playing a 11 hour webm video(celluloid flatpak) i had downloaded off youtube,
the screen froze, I could still hear the video sound playing, but the system wasn’t responding to any keyboard presses(Wouldnt switch over to TTY2-4),
I had heard about REISUB and tried it, but it obviously didnt work, after about 2:30 mins the system unfroze and i was shuffled Across numerous TTY’s and the video closed as i had invoked CLTRL+Q
I am not here for a resolution to my problem The issue is reproducible by loading numerous instances of videos whose combined watch time Exceeds about 7-8 hours
I am more curious as to why SYSRQ is disabled and are there any consequences in enabling it(Security Wise)?
What do you mean by “most consumer distributions”? It’s enabled on Ubuntu. At least REISUB is.
Last I checked, only SUB (Sync, Unmount, reBoot) is enabled by default, you have to edit a sysctl config for REI (Raw keyboard, SIGTERM, SIGKILL) to do anything.
Hm. Actually I wouldn’t have noticed if REI didn’t work when the computer appeared frozen. Just SUB part would have done enough. So you might be right.
I didn’t know that, It wasn’t working on Linux Mint the last time I checked, and i remember reading numerous articles about SYSRQ that mention that most distros ship with the feature disabled by default(Though not why they do that)