> given we needed to handle memory allocation failure Isn't it that the OOM killer is likely to be a much bigger problem? With the overcommit enabled and OOM e

> given we needed to handle memory allocation failure Isn't it that the OOM killer is likely to be a much bigger problem? With the overcommit enabled and OOM enabled I don't think I can envision the case where you would run into a failed allocation - allocations on Unices practically never fail. It is the OOM-killer that will likely kill your process once it detects that the pressure on your ram+swap is high so you won't even have a chance to run into the OOM. OTOH if you disable the OOM-killer there's another and much bigger problem to solve - a kernel panic. I guess that's not the condition you want your system to run into. So, I think that the only combination where you can deterministically detect and run into allocation failures is when both OOM-killer and overcommit are disabled. That's what I think Windows is doing by default.