Fork Bomb and why it doesn't happen on BSDs

[Ow Mun Heng]

I'm starting a new thread because the old one is being mixed in with NAT
and firewall settings.

My question is simple, and hopefully not ulimit/resources related.

As in the article, it was stated that most Linux Distro, regardless of
ulimit settings have this weakness. However, as the article also points
out, ulimit is dependent upon system resources.

eg: SMP W 8GB ram will have a higher limit of processes before it DDOS
itself compared to a say,, Pentium 500 w/ 128MB Ram.

The author then compares the results with that of BSD eg: OpenBSD and
FreeBSD IIRC, and notes that on a system with Pentium 90 w/ 32MB Ram, on
using the forkbomb, doesn't bring the system down to it's knees.

Why is that? I'm assuming that the ulimit on ALL systems is the same. If
anyone can educate me or if they have a BSD box, can they try it out??
say a ulimit of 4093, try forking it to see if it crashes. (or not)

PS : I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything, just asking stupid
questions because I sincerely don't know and I want to be educated.


-- 
Ow Mun Heng
Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 
98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! 
Neuromancer 17:53:48 up 8:31, 6 users, load average: 1.59, 0.92, 0.58