Forkbomb??

[Simon Santoro]

Stuart Bishop wrote:
> Yup. Limit the RAM to something sane and allow people to increase it if they
> need to do something insane. Defaulting max RAM per process to being
> the amount of physical RAM might be a good starting point, although I'd be
> happier with a guesstimate being made by someone more familiar with the
> memory requirements of the larger memory hogs supported in Ubuntu. This
> seems the only solution in the short term until Gnome or Ubuntu is able to
> provide another way to kill these runaways 

So it's a hack until a nice solution is found. Cinelerra and Kino users 
with low end hardware will not be so happy about this decision, I guess.

> (I think the solution used by
> other OSs such as OSX or Windows is a dedicated process-killer application
> that is never allowed to be swapped out, hard wired to a key combination
> that is impossible for other applications to mask or block).

Yes, this would be nice. Allow the user to kill the process if he thinks 
there is something going wrong.

> Speaking from personal experience, I was much happier when the software I
> was testing that occasionally decided it needed 1GB of RAM died with a
> memory error rather than wedge my box and possibly corrupt my hard drive.

Corrupt your hard drive? How could that happen?

> forkbombs would the the other obvious one. Just set a sane limit. I'm not
> talking about silly minimalist default limits like the default shell stack
> size in OSX, but sane ones to catch runaways. 50? 100? 200?

I don't know how you can decide what a "sane" limit is for every machine 
out there. There are servers that fork apache or sendmail a few hundred 
times (sendmail once for each mail), and machines that can handle a few 
thousand procs just fine. There are others that will die with much less. 
As you sad above (if I understood you correctly) the ulimit is a hack, 
and an ugly one if you ask me, and is not the correct solution to the 
problem.

>>>rm -rf ~
>>>How? Remove write access to my files because I could delete them.

> [...] getting this at the
> filesystem level is something for the future.

Yes, I agree. And so is the forkbomb problem. Something for the future, 
when we will be able to understand if those forks are legitimate or not.


IMHO obviously.
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