Turning off overcommitting can break certain applications that relies on it. For example, the address sanitize allocates huge address spaces as shadow memory.

Turning off overcommitting can break certain applications that relies on it. For example, the address sanitize allocates huge address spaces as shadow memory. I do not think overcommitting is the problem. I believe the problem is Linux won't allow memory accesses to fail. It would stuck in a loop trying to free up memory, eventually triggers the oom killer. It could have just let the memory access fail.