[$] Toward a real "too small to fail" rule

Kernel developers have long been told that any attempt to allocate memory
might fail, so their code must be prepared for memory to be unavailable.
Informally, though, the kernel's memory-management subsystem implements a
policy whereby requests below a certain size will not fail (in process
context, at least), regardless of
how tight memory may be. A recent discussion on the linux-mm list has
looked at the idea of making the 'too small to
fail' rule a policy that developers can rely on.