Fork bombing a Linux machine as a non-root user

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Christofer C. Bell wrote:

> Aleksander, can you please name some mainstream commerical Unix
> operating systems that are designed to be "rock stable in real world
> applications" using the criteria you've outlined? (Those criteria
> seeming to be kernel level process starvation protection that's
> "always on" and "intelligent").

I have to admit, none in Unix category that is absolutely perfect (out 
of those I worked with).  But there are some not far from there.  For 
example, OpenBSD can't be brought down by single process being swapped a 
lot.  The mmap/memset attack simply doesn't work on it.  Things do get a 
bit on a slowish side, however services are still responsive and I'm 
perfectly able to login and kill offending process (just tested it on 
ancient sparc station 5 with 64 meg of RAM and old and *slow* disks that 
can hardly do 2 megs/sec).  On Linux, no such luck, brings fast P4 
machine (with relatively fast disks capable of 20 megs/sec) to a halt.

Solaris handles this kind of things more gracefully, as well as old 
Digital's OSF/1 (alias Digital Unix, alias Compaq Tru64, alias whatever 
HP calls it nowdays).

So, there you have a few.  Linux beats them hands down in some 
benchmarks.  But they beat Linux hands down in resource allocations 
under heavy loads.

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7