Rather than give bad advice, it might be better to advise users (1) to run Pg on machines that are likely to be stable and not run into OOM situations, and (2) to check with their vendors about proper overcommit handling.
Would it be possible (or trivial?) to write a small C program to test for memory overcommit behaviour? Might be useful to put in contrib, and mention it in the Admin docs. There are just too many Linux variants and settings to be sure of what exactly the memory overcommit policy is for a particular kernel and distribution.
Linux 2.6 will apparently behave better. I guess they have learnt the lesson. :)
http://kniggit.net/wwol26.html (Under "Other Improvements").
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Linux homer 2.4.18-14 #1 Wed Sep 4 13:35:50 EDT 2002 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
10:30am up 209 days, 1:35, 5 users, load average: 5.08, 5.08, 5.08
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