Description of problem: Several times recently, I've hit bugs where an application enters an infinite loop allocating memory and brings the system to a halt. I wanted to mitigate such problems by setting a resource limit in my login scripts. But none of the available resource limits work for this purpose: - RLIMIT_DATA is ineffective because it covers only the data segment controlled by brk(2), and when glibc's malloc implementation gets a brk failure, it switches to anonymous mmap. I thought the glibc behavior was perverse and filed bug 569714 about it, but that bug was marked NOTABUG without any real justification. - RLIMIT_AS affects programs such as OpenOffice.org that map 2.5 GB of read-only shared libraries. If I set the limit high enough so that OpenOffice.org can run, it provides no protection against a program that allocates 2.5 GB of writable memory. - RLIMIT_RSS doesn't do anything at all in recent kernels. Assuming the glibc behavior is not going to change, I need a resource limit that covers all non-file-backed writable memory mapped by a process. It could be a new resource limit, or the semantics of RLIMIT_DATA could be changed if that won't break other use cases. See: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11758 http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0707.1/0675.html Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.x86_64 How reproducible: See bug 569714 comment #0 to reproduce the ineffectiveness of RLIMIT_DATA.
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