"Applications with dynamic input and dynamic memory usage have some issues with the current overcommitting kernel," Daniel Spång explained looking for ideas on how to best manage out of memory (OOM) situations on embedded systems with little memory and without swap. He noted, "some kind of notification to the application that the available memory is scarce and let the application free up some memory (e.g., by flushing caches), could be used to improve the situation and avoid the OOM killer." Daniel then briefly described four possible solutions, looking for other ideas:

"1) Turn off overcommit. Results in a waste of memory. 2) Nokia uses a lowmem security module to signal on predetermined thresholds. Currently available in the -omap tree. But this requires manual tuning of the thresholds. 3) Using madvise() with MADV_FREE to get the kernel to free mmaped memory, typically application caches, when the kernel needs the memory. 4) A OOM handler that the application registers with the kernel, and that the kernel executes before the OOM-killer steps in."