On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Claudio Martins wrote:
> Well, sometimes I don't care if the kernel kills some processes because of
> a memory hog. But it should kill things like the hog itself or big
> applications.
> What I do *not* understand is why it hapilly kills system management
> processes like syslogd, inetd or sendmail, when they don't use much memory
> or CPU, making my machine useless.
> It's trivial for any user to bring the system to an unusable state:
>
> for(;;) malloc(1);
>
> ...and boom! In 15 seconds there's no more inetd, logins, http, etc :(
Per-user resource limits will avoid monkeys from doing that stuff.
Unfortunately only 2.6 kernel will have this feature, but distribution
vendors will probably use a backported version for 2.4.
Linux per-user resource limits are called "user beancounters", and you can
find a development version at www.asplinux.com.sg/install/ubpatch.html.
Currently there is only kernel-level code.
A userlevel PAM module is needed to make it usable for real systems.
SGI's CSA (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/csa, no code available yet) is a
similar, but more complete per-user resource accouting scheme which will
be ported to Linux in the future.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jul 07 2000 - 21:00:20 EST