[garbre]

I've tried OOM killers and thrash-protect. I've tried numerous tweaks to the vm and swap setting. Nothing works. Memory use gets into the 90%s and the system freezes, hard.

Nonetheless, I'm surprised someone is calling this a bug. Let's face it, Linux is just not a desktop operating system. It's a server operating system, and it expects that it will be professionally administered and tightly controlled to prevent OOM situations. That OOM situations occur on servers too is beside the point. There are reasons for the linux memory system to work as it does, reasons Linus will yell at you about if you complain.