"Are we playing word games here? If a process has a set amount of memory, and it's out of it, then that process is OOM, if a VM is out of memory, it's OOM. Yes,

"Are we playing word games here? If a process has a set amount of memory, and it's out of it, then that process is OOM, if a VM is out of memory, it's OOM. Yes, OOM is typically used for OS OOM, and Linus is talking about rust in the kernel, so that's what OOM would mean." As I just explained an allocator can have its own limits. A process can have multiple allocators. There's no direct logical step that says that because some allocator some failed some allocation, the process itself cannot allocate more ever. "Of course there is, would you treat being out of bread similar to being out of oxygen? Again this can be explained by the context being kernel development and not application development." The parent comment is talking about over commitment and OOM as if these are situations that are completely out of the programs control. They aren't.