Kernel panic caused by fork

[Ivan Voras]

Ivan Radovanovic wrote:
> I was testing FreeBSD's behavior when running many threads at the same
> time (and I find it performs excellent) when I wanted to test how system
> will behave towards program that spawns itself too many times. I wrote a
> very simple program
> 
> #include <sys/types.h>
> #include <unistd.h>
> 
> int main() {
>  while(1)
>    fork();
>  return 0;
> }

A simple fork bomb. Hmm, it should just crash and if it does crash it's
a regression. I've "tested" fork bombs on 7-STABLE and early 8-CURRENT
and they were behaving as expected - stopped at the maxproc limit.

I don't currently have spare 7.x stable machines but I have just run it
on 8-BETA2 one and the maxproc limit still works, though as expected the
console is almost unusable for anything except switching (i.e. processes
don't get to receive input very often). A lot of them are in "locked"
state with "*vm ob" as state/channel name.

I couldn't clean the system from the fork bomb with "killall" as root.

Can you describe your machine? My is an Atom-based (slow) netbook with 1
GB RAM.


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