Forkbomb??

[Stuart Bishop]

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Simon Santoro wrote:
> Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 14:10 +0100, Simon Santoro wrote:
>>
>>> Michael Hipp wrote:
>>>
>>>> Putting a limiting value on procs would help everyone and likely
>>>> harm no-one.
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't agree here. What if a program is designed to make a lot of
>>> forks, for example to solve a math problem (factorize big numbers) or
>>> something like that. That program could not run anymore.

I don't believe that Ubuntu out of the box should be subject to DOS, either
through maliciousness or user errors. At the moment you can lock your
machine by pointing firefox to the wrong web page (lots of images and
firefox quickly chews all available RAM, starts thrashing and GNOME locks up
and logins time out). Similar DOS occurs when a programmer makes a common
mistake and forkbombs their machine or creates a nasty memory leak. Sure,
there will be corner cases where people don't want these limits or need to
increase them (which they can), but the current situation where out of the
box the user can lock up their system so badly they need to power cycle
without shutting down needs to be fixed.

- --
Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop at canonical.com>   http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd.                                http://www.ubuntu.com/
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