process owner migration

Jon Lewis (jlewis@inorganic5.fdt.net)
Sat, 7 Jun 1997 01:21:42 -0400 (EDT)


Has anyone else noticed that particularly when the system is under
incredible load and or extreme memory starvation that processes can change
owners? I've seen this happen at least twice, on totally different
systems, running 2.0.x kernels, and each time, a root owned process became
owned by my regular user account.

The most recent occurrance was on a system running 2.0.28. A coworker had
the brilliant idea of starting X and Netscape on the system even though it
has only 16mb RAM, and was already using about 15mb of its 24mb swap
partition. The system promptly ran out of memory, some processes died, we
got some "Unable to load interpreter" messages syslog'd, we killed X, and
eventually the system recovered. Later, I noticed inetd had ceased
listening for any connections and the process was owned by jlewis.

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