Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.
RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Bug 1203766

Summary: /etc/security/limits.conf rss and memlock not effective, but as is
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Reporter: Peter Chiu <peter.chiu>
Component: pamAssignee: Tomas Mraz <tmraz>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: BaseOS QE Security Team <qe-baseos-security>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 6.6CC: peter.chiu
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-03-19 16:06:19 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Attachments:
Description Flags
limits.conf test log none

Description Peter Chiu 2015-03-19 15:56:57 UTC
Created attachment 1003887 [details]
limits.conf test log

Description of problem: limits.conf items rss and memlock not effective but as is


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): pam-1.1.1-20.el6.x86_64


How reproducible: Yes

Steps:
1.set values in /etc/security/limits.conf (one set at a time)
*                soft    rss             4194304
*                hard    rss             5242880

2. log on as a regular user

3.run a program to allocate memory 

4.use top to monitor the amount of memory used and find memory usage not restricted to the limit set. Log out

5. repeat step 1 - 4, but with different sets of items
*                soft    memlock         4194304
*                hard    memlock         5242880

6. repeat step 1 - 4, with items being "as"
*                soft    as              524288000
*                hard    as              629145600

Actual results:
Resident memory 23G

Expected results:
Resident memory 4G

Additional info:

With items being "as", virtual memory is correctly limited to 500GB.

Comment 1 Tomas Mraz 2015-03-19 16:06:19 UTC
The rss is documented to be ineffective and memlock limits a different thing. I don't see a bug here.

Comment 2 Peter Chiu 2015-03-19 16:11:55 UTC
Inside limits.conf, it describes:
<item> can be one of the following:
#        - core - limits the core file size (KB)
#        - data - max data size (KB)
#        - fsize - maximum filesize (KB)
#        - memlock - max locked-in-memory address space (KB)
#        - nofile - max number of open files
#        - rss - max resident set size (KB)
#

Please can you explain what memlock really does?

If we need to restrict users from having a limit on the resident memory,
what item, if not memlock, should be used?

Thanks.

Comment 3 Tomas Mraz 2015-03-19 16:14:21 UTC
I don't think there is limit equivalent to rss. Memlock is for locked-in memory not for any resident memory that can be paged out.

Perhaps cgroups could help you.