At 05:49 PM 1/14/98 +0000, Alan Cox wrote: >> typical Linux configuration. Although you can avoid users to eat >> resources this way by setting resource limits properly this effect can >> be considered to be a Linux bug. Linux is protected to avoid >> allocating all process slots by normal users. There are reserved >> MIN_TASKS_LEFT_FOR_ROOT slots for root. So there should be also >> protection to avoid allocating all memory by normal users. >This seems to be a generic Unix bug. I brought down our SGI with that >program, and netbsd also seems to jam solid. The general vulnerability >is going to be the same on all OS's (anyone got an NT port ?) or want >to make a summary table. So far as I know, you'll never run NT out of proc table space, since the limit on nearly every sort of handle under NT is 2^32. You'll cripple it from RAM usage long before you run into problems with that. The same deal with handles, except I think that one is only 2^32 per _process_. Don't think we'll see that turn into much of an issue. 4 billion handles ought to be enough for anyone <g> Where you can screw up NT is that the OS has no way to limit any given user's RAM consumption. So a very simple while(ptr = malloc(somesize)); ought to bring just about any NT box close to it's knees. This sort of nonsense is, however, fixed in NT 5.0. I have inadvertantly done this to myself a few times, and it is somewhat interesting - NT gets very, very slow and quite annoyed. It will continue running, and under some conditions will get irate and kill the offending process. In fact, I did this last night on my work machine - came in this morning, logged in, noted that my app had consumed about 1/4 gig of page+RAM, killed the app and went about my work. David LeBlanc |Why would you want to have your desktop user, dleblancat_private |your mere mortals, messing around with a 32-bit |minicomputer-class computing environment? |Scott McNealy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:39:03 PDT