Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/964793/

Kernel developers have long been told that any attempt to allocate memory
might fail, so their code must be prepared for memory to be unavailable.
Informally, though, the kernel’s memory-management subsystem implements a
policy whereby requests below a certain size will not fail (in process
context, at least), regardless of
how tight memory may be. A recent discussion on the linux-mm list has
looked at the idea of making the “too small to
fail” rule a policy that developers can rely on.