I've set up some stuff on my box where /etc/security/limits.conf contains the following:
@users soft nproc 3072 @users hard nproc 4096 I'm in group users, and a simple fork bomb is easily quashed by this: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ :(){ :|:; };: bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable Terminated Oddly enough, trying this again and again yields the same results; but, I can kill the box (eventually; about 1 minute in I managed to `/exec killall -9 bash` from x-chat, since I couldn't get a new shell open) with the below: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ :(){ :|:|:; };: How exactly does the ulimit work? Why do I seem to be able to evade limits on maximum number of processes by doing a bigger fork bomb? I would have thought that the above would have terminated much sooner, since it was spawning x^3 processes instead of x^2 for iteration x and should have hit 4096 a lot sooner. -- We will enslave their women, eat their children and rape their cattle! -- Bosc, Evil alien overlord from the fifth dimension Anti-Spam: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229686 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/