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From: pih100@york.ac.uk (Paul Halliday)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Linux needs more work to be done!
Followup-To: comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Date: 2 Jul 1997 19:46:58 GMT
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Timothy Watson (tmwatson@pita.ccs.itd.umich.edu) wrote:
: Memory-allocation issues do exist, if you have looked at the kernel
: mailing list bit (one is the killing of system daemons, which should
: really be rewritten to be tolerant of memory allocation failures
Is this the same effect as running several callocs in an infinite loop?
e.g. For simplicity;
main()
{
for(;;)
calloc(10000, 8);
}
and run a number of them simultaneously in the background, then try to do
something useful like log in ...
I haven't found a kernel that reacts well to this - most crash (such as
1.1.59, 2.0.0, and everything beyond 2.1.34 that I've tried) - the ALT-F
keys work between sessions, but no sessions will respond - even CTRL-ALT-DEL
fails to do anything.
The only one I've seen to try to stay up is 2.0.27 (I've skipped a few),
which like you describe, results in users being able to kill system
daemons, crash update and send init to the top of the processor queue (and
again render CTRL-ALT-DEL useless).
Unfortunately this hole allows anyone to break a Linux box at will which
doesn't bode well for it if run as, say, a central unix server. Personally
I broke it with a single large calloc when doing a physics project some
months ago and now worry as much about breaking Linux by doing anything
useful as I do about running any of the MS rubbish.
Considering it's always been around, it's surprising it's never been fixed. :-{
Paul.