On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Jan Stary wrote: > If it so happens that there is not enough memory for some running > process (a situaion I cannot rule out now), and there is no swap > to deal with this, is that a reason for a process to be coredumped? > (I think that I have seen processes just die with ENOMEM > in that situaion.)
ENOMEM is somewhat unlikely even in low memory situations, because the kernel allows overcommit. A process can allocate memory that's not technically available, then when it tries to use that memory and the kernel can't find anything to provide, segfault. ENOMEM is an error code, but not a signal, so a process cannot strictly speaking die from it.
