diff --git a/man/man4/zfs.4 b/man/man4/zfs.4
index 2be3a8414a..20bb95c1ae 100644
--- a/man/man4/zfs.4
+++ b/man/man4/zfs.4
@@ -838,6 +838,7 @@ This is a limit on how many pages the ARC shrinker makes available for
 eviction in response to one page allocation attempt.
 Note that in practice, the kernel's shrinker can ask us to evict
 up to about four times this for one allocation attempt.
+To reduce OOM risk, this limit is applied for kswapd reclaims only.
 .Pp
 The default limit of
 .Sy 10000 Pq in practice, Em 160 MiB No per allocation attempt with 4 KiB pages
diff --git a/module/os/linux/zfs/arc_os.c b/module/os/linux/zfs/arc_os.c
index 75a9ea5322..c6b9cb2ddb 100644
--- a/module/os/linux/zfs/arc_os.c
+++ b/module/os/linux/zfs/arc_os.c
@@ -201,9 +201,9 @@ arc_shrinker_count(struct shrinker *shrink, struct shrink_control *sc)
 	 * See also the comment above zfs_arc_shrinker_limit.
 	 */
 	int64_t can_free = btop(arc_evictable_memory());
-	int64_t limit = zfs_arc_shrinker_limit != 0 ?
-	    zfs_arc_shrinker_limit : INT64_MAX;
-	return (MIN(can_free, limit));
+	if (current_is_kswapd() && zfs_arc_shrinker_limit)
+		can_free = MIN(can_free, zfs_arc_shrinker_limit);
+	return (can_free);
 }
 
 static unsigned long