Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 145343
Spontaneously can't fork() as/setuid() to a specific user
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:15:48 EST
Description of problem: Spontaneously, I couldn't fork() (well, clone(), when running an external program from a running bash) as my user or setuid() (when running su) to my user anymore. The system calls return EAGAIN which indicates it runs against RLIMIT_NPROC, but this can't really be as there are only a couple of processes running (about 20, both soft and hard limits are 8191 on that machine). When I kill all processes of that user on the machine, things are back to normal. Maybe something corrupts the RLIMIT_NPROCS setting. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.10-1.737_FC3 kernel-2.6.10-1.741_FC3 How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: ? -- If I experience it again, maybe I can find a apattern, but I'm not sure about it now. Actual results: clone() from user, setuid() to user fail with EAGAIN. Other users are fine. Expected results: clone(), setuid() work
Problem persists on kernel-2.6.10-1.770_FC3. Processes running when the problem happened this time: --- 8< --- root@wombat:~> pgrep -u nils -l 16782 ssh-agent 16866 gconfd-2 17109 gam_server 20771 spamd 20773 spamd 20774 spamd 20775 spamd 20776 spamd 20777 spamd 21490 esd --- >8 ---
An update has been released for Fedora Core 3 (kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) which may contain a fix for your problem. Please update to this new kernel, and report whether or not it fixes your problem. If you have updated to Fedora Core 4 since this bug was opened, and the problem still occurs with the latest updates for that release, please change the version field of this bug to 'fc4'. Thank you.
Doesn't seem to happen anymore with recent FC4 kernels.