Is it possible to give the user the option to cancel forkbombs?

Martin Olsson
2007-11-16T21:30:17Z

Dear kernel hackers,

This is a message from below 0x7FFFFFFF. Please look at this bug (it's
not a new concept but still):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/163185

I'm no expert but I'd guess the "complete freeze" part of the bug has to
do with the kernel, no? It would be nice to have a system which always
lets me choose to abort stuff regardless of what kind of program mess I
accidently started. Sort of like how you can "always" count on
CTRL-ALT-DEL to work. Maybe it's possible to set some kind of
MAX_PROCESS_COUNT for each user (I don't know) but it looks like this is
not done by default in many distros today?

I mean, this effectively took down both my laptop and made the server of
my shared web hosting company unresponsive for >10 mins (maybe it had
some auto-reboot mechanism, I'm not sure).

Martin