Vulnerability Development mailing list archives
Re: luser beeing able to kill random root owned procs (linux 2.2.20) ?
From: rpc <rpc () crucified org>
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 16:55:52 -0800 (PST)
On Wed, 1 Jan 1997, Ralf Dreibrodt wrote:
Hi,while running "vi `perl -e 'print "." x 90000000'`" on a 2.2.20 linux kernel as a normal user, I've noticed: forsaken:~$ dmesg VM: killing process snmpd forsaken:~$ uname -rs Linux 2.2.20 snmpd was running as root (this machine has 64MBytes of RAM)the user is not allowed to kill a process owned by root, the user is allowed to use all RAM (and probably swap). you can test whether he is allowed to and what will happen, when you execute something like this: while true; do temp=$(echo temp$temp$temp$temp); done
No, this is an artifact of Rik van Riel's OOM (out of memory) Kill code of the linux VM. When system resources are low, a process is chosen with a 'badness' algorithm (oom_kill.c in the kernel source tree). Obviously, the code still needs more tweaking. --rpc
bye Ralf
Current thread:
- Re: luser beeing able to kill random root owned procs (linux 2.2.20) ? Ralf Dreibrodt (Nov 09)
- Re: luser beeing able to kill random root owned procs (linux 2.2.20) ? rpc (Nov 09)