On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 01:57:20PM +0200, Alexandre Ratchov wrote:
quoted text
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 12:41:04AM +0400, Dmitry-T wrote:
> > Try to recover ballance:
> > renice 20 -p 30996
> > renice -20 -p 21919 25914 754
>          ^^^^^
> 
> If you run any cpu bound process with priority -20, you will give all
> the cpu to that process, without giving any chance to other processes
> to run, so your box will hang until it terminates. This requires root
> privileges.
> 
> > 
> > It is not secure. One user script or program may load CPU and
> > database or another servers lost speed in disk operations.
> > This is hole for DOS attacks in OpenBSD design.
> 
> Yeah, this is an attack root can do by renicing a cpu bound process,
> but ``rm -rf /'' is much easier, isn't it?

I was curious why no one brought this up earlier. A normal user _can't_
nice processes to anything below 0. Therefore this point is moot.