[smcameron]

Failure of malloc() might be a bad example to pick because on linux, by default, most distros overcommit, so malloc won't fail, generally. Instead, malloc will succeed allocating the address space just fine, but the RAM will get allocated upon first use, meaning that even though malloc gave you a supposedly valid pointer rather than NULL, actually using that pointer will crash your program.

[mav3rick]

Other distros may have this differently and return NULL. It's not portable and also just bad to not check for it.

[tannhaeuser]

Is there a way to fix this/switch it off? I never got the rationale for this behaviour.

[zorked]

There's a sysctl: vm.overcommit_memory=2

What most people don't realize is that you will get more OOMs if you disable overcommit.