Alan's overcommit patch, brought to 2.5 by Robert Love.

Can't say I've tested its functionality at all, but it doesn't crash,
it has been in -ac and RH kernels for some time and I haven't observed
any of its functions on profiles.

"So what is strict VM overcommit?  We introduce new overcommit
 policies that attempt to never succeed an allocation that can not be
 fulfilled by the backing store and consequently never OOM.  This is
 achieved through strict accounting of the committed address space and
 a policy to allow/refuse allocations based on that accounting.

 In the strictest of modes, it should be impossible to allocate more
 memory than available and impossible to OOM.  All memory failures
 should be pushed down to the allocation routines -- malloc, mmap, etc.

 The new modes are available via sysctl (same as before).  See
 Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting for more information."