Re: Locking processes against being killed when low on memory

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:54:45 +0900 (JST)
yamt%mwd.biglobe.ne.jp@localhost (YAMAMOTO Takashi) wrote:

> > I wrote a program that was intended to grab and zero all free
> > memory. When I tried running it while multiuser, it crashed the
> > machine...  I was unable to reproduce that in single-user, and
> > since I was in X I have no idea what the crash was.  (Why did I
> > write such a program?  I wanted to generate a system core file to
> > upload.  First, I know from experience (and running the 'strings'
> > command) that a lot of sensitive information can be left lying
> > around memory.  Second, when most of RAM is zeros the file
> > compresses a lot better, and that's a big advantage when you have
> > 3GB of RAM in the dump...)
> 
> please investigate what the crash was and file a PR.
> 
I'll try, but with no message and no dump that isn't easy...


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb