Re: [RFC/PATCH] RLIMIT_ARG_MAX

Linus Torvalds
2008-02-29T17:31:15Z

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)?

Linus