On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:38:30 +1100, David Chinner said:

quoted text
> Perhaps instead of swapping immediately, a SIGLOWMEM could be sent
> to a processes that aren't masking the signal followed by a short
> grace period to allow the processes to free up some memory before
> swapping out pages from that process?

AIX had SIGDANGER some 15 years ago.  Admittedly, that was sent when
the system was about to hit OOM, not when it was about to start swapping.

I suspect both approaches have their merits...