It doesn't get in that situation, because malloc() can return null on Solaris (i.e. it never¹ overcommits).

While in general I think this is vastly better than the somewhat insane Linux OOM killer, you can get in awkward situations where you can't start any processes (including a root shell) because you're out of memory.

I rather like the FreeBSD solution to this, which is to not overcommit, but after a certain number of allocation failures it kills the process using the most memory. This prevents situations where you can't start any processes.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution to handling low memory conditions, but the Linux solution manages to almost never do what you want which is kind of impressive in a way.

¹ I seem to recall hearing somewhere that you can allow allocations to overcommit on a per-application basis on later versions of Solaris, but don't quote me on this.