The oom killer already exists on servers and already can kill programs. If you want to turn off overcommit and have the system power off when it runs out of me

The oom killer already exists on servers and already can kill programs. If you want to turn off overcommit and have the system power off when it runs out of memory, the kernel allows that. Whatever knob they add will certainly be configurable, and ubuntu desktop can configure it one way while ubuntu server configures it the other, if it turns out people would prefer that. In practice, people running servers seem to want oom killers to kick in before the server barfs. One example of this is facebook's oomd [1]. I assure you, they're running that on their servers, not their web-browser-machines. [1]: https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd