Is it normal that a user can take down the whole system by using too much memory?

[RW]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2018 00:46:34 +0100
RW wrote:

> On Sat, 02 Jun 2018 19:25:31 -0400
> Brennan Vincent wrote:
> 
> 
> > I'm also curious, however, to learn more from an OS design
> > perspective. Why isn't it possible for the kernel to realize it
> > should kill `eatmem` rather than make the system unusable?  
> 
> I did something similar a few years ago, and the process was reliably
> killed.

I should have added that that was without virtualization, or ZFS.