Jul 23, 2026

Of all of the stupid things an operating system can do, this is the worst category. The purpose of the OS is to manage shared resources. Returning success on a malloc that cannot be satisfied (overcommit) and then killing (possibly other!) processes when that malloc'd address is actually touched (too late to return an error), is just unforgivable. It would be exactly like killing the process because another process wants to use the network, the CPU, or the keyboard for that matter.