Re: luser beeing able to kill random root owned procs (linux 2.2.20) ?

[rpc <rpc () crucified org>]

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