Re: [RFC/PATCH] RLIMIT_ARG_MAX

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

On Fri 2008-02-29 09:29:19, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >
> > > ... and what's the point? We've never had it before, nobody has ever cared, 
> > > and the whole notion is just stupid. Why would we want to limit it? The 
> > > only thing that the kernel *cares* about is the stack size - any other 
> > > size limits are always going to be arbitrary.
> > 
> > Well, don't think of limiting it, but querying the limit.
> > 
> > Programs like xargs would need to know how much to stuff into argv
> > before starting a new invocation.
> 
> But they already can't really do that. More importantly, isn't it better 
> to just use the whole stack size then (or just return "stack size / 4" or 
> whatever)?

Using whole stack smells like a security problem to me.

...pass so much parameters that passwd dies on stack shortage. Make
sure passwd grabbed some system-wide lock before dying.

						Pavel
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