I'd say the kernel going on a shooting spree wherein the OOM kill starts taking out innocent processes as they touch memory pages they were legitimately allocated is a perfect example of "getting into wars with the kernel".
My point was that (a) if the server actually goes to war with the kernel, on modern setups it will usually be taken out by the OOM killer instead of just getting slower like the article states, and (b) most database servers run just fine without being taken out by the OOM killer, which means they're designed in a way that actually does not go to war with the kernel.
