Re: forkbombing Linux distributions

[Jan Engelhardt]

>>William> Sure enough, I created the following script and ran it as a
>>William> non-root user:
>>
>>William> #!/bin/bash $0 & $0 &
>>
>>There are two approaches to fixing this.
>>  1.  Rate limit fork()
>>  2.  Limit (per user) the number of processes allowed
>
>Had to try it out of curiosity, five ssh logins at the time, 
>but I hit Ctrl-S on the terminal running forkbomb, then other 
>terminals responsive and I could recover, do 'killall forkbomb'.

By the time you killed a handful of procs, the other half spawned new ones.

You can try stopping forkbombs by "killall -STOP nameofprog" and then 
"killall -9 nameofprog".

But you probably won't get to run killall in case of a thrasher running within 
the limits of `ulimit -m` and `ulimit -u`:
  perl -e 'fork,$_="x"x 10E6 while 1'


Jan Engelhardt
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