I've observed audit regressions in 4.11-rc when not using a userspace audit daemon. The most obvious issue is that audit messages are not appearing in dmesg anymore. If a sufficient number of audit messages are generated the kernel will also start invoking the OOM killer.
It looks like previously, when there's no auditd in userspace kauditd would call kauditd_hold_skb(), which prints the message using printk and either frees the skb or queues it (with a limit on the number of queued skb's by default). Since 5b52330bbfe6 "audit: fix auditd/kernel connection state tracking" when there's no auditd kauditd will instead use the retry queue, which has no limit. But it will not process the retry queue when there's no auditd, so messages pile up there indefinitely. Thanks, Seth