On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:46:22 EDT, Gustavo Chain said:
quoted text
> El Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:14:06 +0930
> David Newall <david=40davidnewall.com> escribi=F3:
> > That was what I thought you had in mind; it protects from some kind
> > of fork bomb, right?  But it doesn't seem useful unless you guarantee=
=20
quoted text
> > having a process already running (with CAP_SYS_ADMIN) *before* the
> > bomb goes off.
>=20
> Not really, because fork bomb will never reach maximum pid possible.
> And root will always have a =22slot=22 to kill desired processes.

What David meant was that =22root will always have a slot=22 doesn't *act=
ually*
help unless you *also* have a way to actually *spawn* such a process.  In=
 order
to do the ps, kill, and so on that you need to recover, you need to alrea=
dy
have either a root shell available, or a way to *get* a root shell that d=
oesn't
rely on a non-root process (so /bin/su doesn't help here).

Many distros will leave a /sbin/mingetty running on tty1 through tty6, an=
d
you *can* use those to get a root shell.  David's point is that without
something like that already in place, the patch doesn't help....