Linux-2.0.34 & crashme

Andreas Haumer (andreas@xss.co.at)
Tue, 26 May 1998 00:47:23 +0200


Hi Alan, hi all,

after spending days stress-testing my various Linux-machines
(under Linux-2.0.34pre16) with heavy disk-I/O, network-I/O, high
CPU-load, forking and flood-pinging, without a single hickup
since the ISDN problems were solved, I went crazy:
I remembered the famous "crashme" program, which creates
and executes lots of illegal code.

Well, I tried it both as root and as unprivileged user,
and guess what: Linux-2.0.34pre16 locked solid in both
cases after just about 10 minutes... :-(
No logfile-entry, no "oops" on the console, just dead!

I checked it with one of my HP-UX 10.20 machines, and
it survived more than 1 hour before I stopped the "crashme"
process.

I think I remember someone was claiming Linux is immune
against these "crashme" programs? It's _very_ bad a normal,
unprivileged user can lock the machine with crashme!
Does anyone have other results with crashme & Linux-2.0.34
(be they better or worse)?

The DUT was system 3 (if you remember my previous test results),
a big server machine with 16GB SW-RAID5, Dual 2940UW, 256MB RAM
AMD K6-233, and I enabled almost every function when configuring
the test kernel.
I'll try it with a smaller kernel next time, just to see if it
makes any difference...

- andreas

-- 
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