You could def provide an upper bound, though I imagine that'd just cause more people to be annoyed on this thread, complaining that linux doesn't give them memory when there's tons available. And to be honest, if you want this behavior you can basically get it already; check your mem.pressure and react to that. Linux isn't going to give you a null pointer, but you can def react to memory pressure.

> It is perfectly possible for a system kernel to execute in bounded memory

Is it possible while maintaining anything like the feature set that linux provides currently?