[Bug 71024] Re: ulimit / pam limits don't work

[Samus Aran]

This bug still exists today.  No way to limit RAM usage of apps, no
mention of this in the limits.conf example file which still has examples
for "rss".

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Title:
  ulimit / pam limits don't work

Status in “pam” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Memory limiting with pam/ulimit doesn't seem to be working in edgy.

  E.g., add these 3 lines to /etc/security/limits.conf:
  ---8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
  testuser hard rss 30700
  testuser hard memlock 30700
  testuser hard data 50900
  --->8-------------------------------------------------------------------

  Then login as testuser and allocate memory:
  ---8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
  $ ulimit -d -l -m -v
  data seg size           (kbytes, -d) 50900
  max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 30700
  max memory size         (kbytes, -m) 30700
  virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
  $ ./alloc 150 &
  Allocating 150 MiB = 157286400 byte buffer...OK
  Filling the buffer...OK
  $ ps u 7525
  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  testuser  7525  0.5  7.4 155052 154008 tty1    S    06:11   0:01 ./alloc 150
  $
  --->8-------------------------------------------------------------------

  As you can see the RSS limit is 30700 KiB, yet 154008 KiB (i.e., more than 4 times the limit) was easily allocated.
  The computer is an Athlon64 running in 32bit mode with 2 GiB of RAM and 1 GiB of swap, and "uname -a" says:
  "Linux epox 2.6.17-10-generic #2 SMP Fri Oct 13 18:45:35 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux"

  (In case you're wondering, the alloc program does this: "uint8_t *buf;
  buf=malloc(bytes); for (i=0; i<bytes; i++) buf[i]=(uint8_t)(i&0xff);"
  plus some checks and printf():s and finally a pause().)

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