Subject: Re: Fork bomb protection patch (Was: Re: CVS commit: syssrc/sys/kern)
To: Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@netbsd.org>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/08/2002 19:23:13
[ On Sunday, December 8, 2002 at 20:47:12 (+0100), Jaromir Dolecek wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Fork bomb protection patch (Was: Re: CVS commit: syssrc/sys/kern)
>
> Chance is nobody ever thought about solution like this. It is in
> FreeBSD tree for about half a year only now.

Oh, come on now.  Get a clue!

I believe this forced sleep idea is as old as it is silly and wrong,
though I don't have any firm references to prove it so (probably because
none of them survived long enough to get published).


> I guess that it did
> not cause any ill effects for them so far, since there are no
> further refinements to the behaviour in later commits, and the code
> is still there (just shuffled a bit due to unrelated kernel changes).

Like that means anything useful or important....  FreeBSD is chock full
of rather bad hacks and other inelegant code.

> They also have it pulled to stable branch, so FreeBSD 4.7
> is likely to include it.

It will not stay long enough to be compiled in my copy of their tree! 


> Generally, I'd be really interested if the new behaviour causes
> any problems on any real system. The change is very clever hack.

You have a very different definition of "clever" than I do.

> It definitely appears to solve the problem in hand in quite
> elegant way.

and a very different definition of "elegant" too, it seems.

> It's kinda "why I never thought about this?" thing.

I really don't think so.


> I guess that more experience is needed to actually prove if the
> behaviour is useful, or if it causes too many problems.

Exactly, so get it the heck out of the tree until you have good
scientific proof one way or another.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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