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Member since:
2006-05-23
But that's true for any OS. If a user has access to a machine then it would only take a determined halfwit to bring it to it's knees.
Have to disagree; IMO the entire goal and purpose of a multiuser OS is to prevent users from stepping on each other's toes. Obviously some of this is the sysadmin's responsibility; but I do think it's good to have default setups that are more fool-proof in multiuser environments, since that's probably where Linux sees the most use. (I think?)
That said, operating systems are imperfect, like the humans that create them.
Re handling of OOM conditions. IIRC the BSDs handle this by making malloc() fail if there's not enough memory for it. From what I recall of C, this will probably cause the calling program to crash, which I think is what you want in most cases - unless the calling program is something like top or kill! But I doubt you'd easily get conditions where $bloatyapp would keep running while kill would get terminated.
(Linux has a couple options like this. The OOM killer can be set to kill the first application that exceeds available memory; or you can set the kernel to make malloc() fail if more than a percentage of RAM + total swap would be filled. Sadly, there is as of yet no "fail malloc() when physical RAM is exceeded and never mind the swap" setting.)