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SubjectRe: Fork Bombing Patch
Anand Jahagirdar wrote:
> Hi
> As Per the Previous Discussion of my Patch,I think insted of using
> KERN_CRIT,it is better to lower the priority level to KERN_WARNING.
> thats why i used KERN_WARNING.it will warn administrator and its
> administrator responsibility to take whatever action he want to take.
>
> anand

Philosophically, I'm okay with the idea of a forkbomb meriting KERN_WARN
priority, but we should never have a printk that can be trivially triggered by
an unprivileged user that gets anything higher than KERN_INFO. If I'm an
attacker, and I want to do bad things without getting logged, the first thing I
do is launch a carefully-tuned forkbomb that doesn't bog down the system, just
triggers this message as often as the ratelimit will allow. Once /var/log is
full, I can do my nastiness. Administrators need to be able to protect against
that kind of thing without losing the ability to log KERN_WARN and higher
priority messages.

Also, I stand by my assertion that we should only be complaining if the hard
limit is also exceeded, since it's totally valid for an application to
self-constrain using soft limits. It may be uncommon, but the people who happen
to use whatever applications do this will be very unhappy when they update their
kernel and /var fills up from this spew.

-- Chris
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