From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Mar 22 9:27:53 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from acl.lanl.gov (acl.lanl.gov [128.165.147.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 778C637BF13 for ; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 09:27:49 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from rminnich@lanl.gov) Received: from mini.acl.lanl.gov (root@mini.acl.lanl.gov [128.165.147.34]) by acl.lanl.gov (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA658020 for ; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:27:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from localhost (rminnich@localhost) by mini.acl.lanl.gov (8.9.3/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA01379 for ; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:27:39 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: mini.acl.lanl.gov: rminnich owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:27:39 -0700 (MST) From: "Ronald G. Minnich" X-Sender: rminnich@mini.acl.lanl.gov To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: How a normal user can crash any linux system (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG anybody want to try this on -current? ron ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:02:40 +0100 From: Michael Lampe To: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu Subject: How a normal user can crash any linux system I found the following by accident playing with PVM. If you start the 'gexample' from the examples directory with dimension=10000 and no of tasks=32 on one machine, it becomes almost immediately completely un- usable and begins with heavy swapping. Considering how much memory would be necessary for this computation before starting it would have avoided the trouble. So the processes go on allocating memory until physical memory and swap is exhausted. At this point processes are killed and now things are really becoming interesting: One would expect that the misbehaving gexample processes are killed or maybe other processes started by the same user. Actually random processes are killed: I've seen klogd, syslogd, cron, gpm and inetd disappear. In some cases the machine was unaccessible locally as well as remotely, but the kernel seemed to be still running -- ping showed the machine still up. Apart from the specific system processes that are killed, the problem can be reproduced under many different configurations. I have tried SuSE 6.0 with kernel 2.2.12, SuSE 6.2 with kernel 2.2.14, LinuxPPC R4/R5 (Red Hat 5.x based) with some recent 2.2.x kernels and finally the SuSE pre-release for PPC. PVM was 3.4.x. Any comments ???? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message