There is actually a possibility for Linux processes to do exactly that if they use the vmpressure_fd() (http://lwn.net/Articles/524742/ http://lwn.net/Articles/

There is actually a possibility for Linux processes to do exactly that if they use the vmpressure_fd() (http://lwn.net/Articles/524742/ http://lwn.net/Articles/524742/ ). EDIT: Now that I look closer, it's possible that vmpressure_fd() was never merged into mainline and therefore is not really available.