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Maybe I'm just insane, but if I'm on a machine with ample memory, and a process for some reason can't allocate resources, I want that process to fail ASAP. Same thing with high memory pressure situations, just kill greedy/hungry processes, please.

Like something is going very wrong if the system is in that state, so I want everything to die immediately.

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sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=2. However, programs for *nix-based systems usually expect overcommit to be on, for example, to support fork(). This is a stark contrast with Windows NT model, where an allocation will fail if it doesn't fit in the remaining memory+swap.

People disable memory overcommit, expecting to fix OOMs, and then they get surprised when their programs start failing mallocs while there are still tons of discardable page cache in the system.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/797835/1027 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/797841/1027

systems-oomd does this.

The kernel oom killer is concerned with kernel survival, not user space performance.

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