fork() troubles gone in 2.1.19 (was: NT vulnerable to attack on CPU)

Trevor Johnson (trevor@jpj.net)
Wed, 1 Jan 1997 10:56:56 -0801 (PST)

On Tue, 24 Dec 1996 bofh@snoopy.virtual.net.au wrote:
>
> >Nothing made it into the syslog when I tried this exploit. Suppose I'd done
>
> I have written and run test programs such as that and not had any problems.
> Your oops indicates that there is some bug in process handling in the kernel
> you are running. Other versions of the Linux kernel do not have this bug.

Running the fork bomb from the root account (limits imposed only by the
kernel) for nearly ten hours didn't cause a crash, whereas under
2.1.17--with a slightly different kernel configuration--I got multiple
oopses instantly.

~# uptime
7:29am up 9:40, 3 users, load average: 491.90, 491.35, 491.05
~# limit
cputime unlimited
filesize 1048576 kbytes
datasize unlimited
stacksize 8192 kbytes
coredumpsize 0 kbytes
memoryuse unlimited
descriptors 512
memorylocked unlimited
maxproc 256

Here's a list of the changes to the configuration:

--- arch/i386/defconfig Sun Dec 29 16:43:25 1996
+++ .config Tue Dec 31 10:23:46 1996
-CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y
+# CONFIG_MODVERSIONS is not set
-# CONFIG_M386 is not set
-# CONFIG_M586 is not set
-# CONFIG_M686 is not set
-# CONFIG_VIDEO_SELECT is not set
+CONFIG_VIDEO_SELECT=y
-CONFIG_IPV6=m
+# CONFIG_IPV6 is not set
-CONFIG_LLC=y
+# CONFIG_LLC is not set
-CONFIG_SCSI_CONSTANTS=y
+# CONFIG_SCSI_CONSTANTS is not set
-CONFIG_MSDOS_FS=m
+CONFIG_MSDOS_FS=y
___
Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net>