Re: Protecting processes from the OOM killer

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 2003-03-03 at 14:45, Jesse Pollard wrote:
> Shouldn't - the process the user tries to run will not be started since
> it must reserve the space first. malloc will fail immediately, allowing the
> process to handle the even gracefully and exit.
> 
> Anything else is a bug in the application.

The one case you can't cover cleanly in C is a stack grow exceeding memory
usage. At that point it requires a tiny bit of magic. You can do it, but 
the overcommit blocker has to armwave a little for the kernel and other
things so I've never seen it happen in a normal situation