On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Peter van den Heuvel wrote:
I think this one is too easy and something should be done, specially if "this one is rather old". I've not heard one single argument why this couldn't and shouldn't be fixed. If the kernel is killing processes it might just as well try to locate the offending PID and kill that tree (childs included). I wouldn't care if the kernel temporarily halted all user processes for a few seconds while it sat down and thought about something effective. A procedure could be: 1) Detect resource depletion 2) prevent any user-process resource consumption 3) Count that resource for all pid's 4) Add the resource count of all childs to the parent (and again, all the way to the root) 5) Walk the parent -> child tree and look for one PID that suddenly has more than 50% of the resource 6) Kill that process tree 7) Resume normal operation
Or something...
CIAO, Peter
This is untested, but my reading of the manpages leads me to believe that this trivial fork bomb would be stopped dead by a simple inclusion of `ulimit -Hu 100` in /etc/profile . -- Rick Green "I have the heart of a little child, and the brain of a genius. ... and I keep them in a jar under my bed"