Re: [RFC/PATCH] RLIMIT_ARG_MAX

Pavel Machek
2008-03-04T20:10:43Z

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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