Fork bombing a Linux machine as a non-root user

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 14:04 -0600, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> 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).

Putting Aleksander on direct CC because I really want to know this.

On the BSD boxes, if you do a fork bomb on the same ulimits does it
crash(I'm assuming of course thet BSDs have ulimtis too)? I would think
not. (per your explanation above)

Hence, it's no wonder why I wonder why that is so for the BSD box.

What is the difference between how LInux and how BSD handles forks?

> 

-- 
Ow Mun Heng
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