OOM killer stops the compositor, not the process that caused it

[loss-and-quick]

System Information

• Distribution: Arch Linux
• Compositor: Hyprland

  Description

  I attempted to execute a fork bomb After performing this operation, the screen went black, and going to tty, I read logs indicating that the compositor had been terminated by the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer:

  Nov 16 03:53:33 host systemd[1016]: wayland-wm@Hyprland.service: Consumed 8min 32.840s CPU time, 13.5G memory peak.
  Nov 16 03:53:33 host systemd[1016]: wayland-wm@Hyprland.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
  Nov 16 03:53:33 host systemd[1016]: Stopped Main service for Hyprland, An_intelligent_dynamic_tiling_Wayland_compositor.
  Nov 16 03:53:33 host systemd[1016]: wayland-wm@Hyprland.service: Failed with result 'oom-kill'.
  Nov 16 03:25:35 host systemd[1]: [user@1000.service](mailto:user@1000.service): A process of this unit has been killed by the OOM killer.
  Nov 16 03:25:35 host systemd[1015]: [wayland-wm@Hyprland.service](mailto:wayland-wm@Hyprland.service): A process of this unit has been killed by the OOM killer.

  Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Execute the fork bomb command: :(){ :|:& };: or python -c "memory_hog = [' ' * 10**6 for _ in iter(int, 1)]"

Expected Behavior

I expected the system to handle the fork bomb by killing the process of it.

Actual Behavior

The OOM killer was triggered, resulting in the termination of compositor.

[loss-and-quick]

Using a fork bomb, I simulated the compilation of the project, as the original issue was discovered during the compilation of a Rust project.