I see a few people complaining about oom killing. Allow me to make a case for it. I think oom killing is a very pragmatic solution to deal with low memory. With

I see a few people complaining about oom killing. Allow me to make a case for it. I think oom killing is a very pragmatic solution to deal with low memory. Without overcommit you don't need the oom killer. But just simply disabling overcommit will make your system unusable during low memory situation just as much. Imagine that one job ate all your memory. How do you restore your system? You cannot allocate more memory so you can no longer start up a new shell to kill the bad process. So you are just as stuck with an unusable system. I wrote about this here: https://superuser.com/a/984715 https://superuser.com/a/984715 What I really want is to have an always responsive system. You cannot get this easily on linux because it doesn't allow to disable all paging (executable pages are still paged out even with swap disabled). This means you can easily lock up your machine if you use a lot of memory (even without swap -- I don't use swap). The above post contains a 20 line C program example that will break your system that you can only cure by applying the oom killer. I mean what other options do you have you have 0 free memory? Could a kernel hacker reading this add such an option to linux to a poor sysadmin like myself?