this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
602 points (95.6% liked)

linuxmemes

21207 readers
61 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.

  • Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
     
    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

    They could always do what Android does and give you a prompt to force close an app that hangs for too long, or have a default subprocess limit and an optional whitelist of programs that can have as many subprocesses as they want.

    [–] barsoap@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

    The thing about fork bombs that it's not particular process which takes up all the resources, they're all doing nothing in a minimal amount of space. You could say "ok this group of processes is using a lot of resources" and kill it but then you're probably going to take down the whole user session as the starting point is not trivial to establish. Though I guess you could just kill all shells connected to the fork morass, won't fix the general case but it's a start. OTOH I don't think kernel devs are keen on special-case solutions.

    [–] sus@programming.dev 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    You don't really have to kill every process, limiting spawning of new usermode processes after a limit has been reached should be enough, combine that with a warning and always reserving enouh resources for the kernel and critically important processes to remain working and the user should have all the tools needed to find what is causing the issue and kill the responsible processes

    While nobody really cares enough to fix these kinds of problems for your basic home computer, I think this problem is mostly solved for cloud/virtualization providers