Until today, I had no idea something like this even existed. The nohang script provides an alternative to the default Out Of Memory (OOM) killer in the Linux kernel. As a matter of fact, it's a tool written in Python that works fully in userland using a daemon that will check for an out of memory condition before shutting down a process and, hopefully, preventing a system hang caused by a lack of memory. I also found a short article describing how it works. {link to this entry}