On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 5:47 PM Emery Berger emery.berger@gmail.com wrote:
For what it's worth, my research group attacked basically exactly this problem some time ago. We built a modified Linux kernel that we called Redline that was utterly resilient to fork bombs, malloc bombs, and so on. No process could take down the system, much less unprivileged ones. I think some of the ideas we described back then would be worth adopting / adapting today (the code is of course hopelessly out of date: we published our paper on this at OSDI 2008).
I'm unable to find a concurring or dissenting opinions on this. What kind of peer review has it received? Was it ever raised with upstream kernel developers? What were there responses?
I wonder if the question of interactivity is just not a priority upstream still, as they see various competing user space solutions for this problem and that this suggests a generic solution is either not practical to incorporate into the kernel, or maybe it isn't desired?