On 2021-04-11 12:19 p.m., Alexander Kanavin wrote:

make already has -l option for limiting new instances if load average is
too high, so it's only natural to add a RAM limiter too.

   -l [N], --load-average[=N], --max-load[=N]
                               Don't start multiple jobs unless load is
below N.

In any case, patches welcome :)

During today's Yocto technical call (1),
we talked about approaches to limiting the system load and avoiding
swap and/or OOM events. Here's what (little!) i recall from the
discussion, 9 busy hours later.

In the short run, instead of independently maintaining changes to
configurations to limit parallelism or xz memory usage, etc, we
could develop an optional common include file where such limits
are shared across the community.

In the longer run, changes to how bitbake schedules work may be needed.

Richard says that there was a make/build server idea and maybe even a
patch from a while ago. It may be in one of his poky-contrib branches.
I took a few minutes to look but nothing popped up. A set of keywords to
search for might help me find it.