Talking about OOM: why is it that the only negotiation protocol between the kernel and userland is to hard-kill the userland processes when out of memory. I wis

Talking about OOM: why is it that the only negotiation protocol between the kernel and userland is to hard-kill the userland processes when out of memory. I wish there was some sort of soft-OOM where the application would get notice and be given a bit of advance to free memory.