sure, but how much memory? Here’s how I imagine it working (based on approximately zero knowledge): OOM killer is triggered The kernel code for the OOM killer (including heuristics) has to be swapped in. This code should only be a few KB at most so won’t actually take long. The code has to be executed. To do so it needs to access information about all processes Even if this information can be swapped out, it, likewise, is very small. So in my imagination it only takes two small blobs of data being swapped in - if kernel code and process information even can be swapped out; maybe it can be protected. Maybe you know something that ruins this picture though.