That seems full of edge cases. If your reserve isn't big enough it doesn't help and if it's too big then it's a waste. It seems much cleaner to be able to grace

That seems full of edge cases. If your reserve isn't big enough it doesn't help and if it's too big then it's a waste. It seems much cleaner to be able to gracefully abort whatever operation you were doing. Presumably there is already error handling for fs/network errors. Usually you can hop onto those handlers with memory errors and be just fine. Though if it's linux it'll just kill you anyway :-). (Yeah, I know you can turn the OOM killer off).