Allright. I managed to solve the lockup/freeze/reboot problem. Oddly
enough, I unset an environment variable and, a program which expected
to find another program in that variable didn't complain. I honestly
don't know what the true cause was; I just know that everything worked
well until I tried a kill/killall, and then everything went to hell;
load averages shot up to 150 in a matter of seconds, and shutdowns
took 20 minutes.
This brings up what I think is an important issue, and what I'm sure
there's a solution for. If this system wasn't under my control, I
would have repeatedly crashed it. The program I was running wasn't
setuid root or anything, but if I understood this bug, it seems that I
could, if given an account on someone's system, install the program in
my home directory and send load averages soaring.
So, what mechanisms are there to deal with this? I'm assuming shell
limits, but what limits should be used to control load averages? Or, I
guess a more clueful question is, does anyone have a reasonable set of
tested limits which would allow for . . . fair use of the CPU without
letting one user drag it to a stop?
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