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I dearly wish overcommit could be disabled per-cgroup, but AFAIK this is not possible.

malloc failing seems like a much simpler indication of memory pressure than the alternatives like PSI.

AIUI, you can always use plain old ulimit to restrict virtual memory usage per-process, which has the same outcome as disabling overcommit.

yeah, for a single process. but I’m mostly interested in doing this for a process tree (like a browser), and I don’t think this would work well in that case, since the limit would apply to each process individually.

this would work if there was a cgroup virtual address space controller, but I think those have been proposed but never merged.

In my short experience you can't disable overcommit if you're using Linux on desktop because programs using gtk/glib freak out when they can't malloc.

That works for the systems I control. Most of the time I encounter OOM shenanigans on the systems which aren't mine.