Comment 11 for bug 391761

Am 28.11.2011 17:17, schrieb Steve Langasek:
> How does it "crash"?
I apologize if the term "crash" was a bit unprecise. It does not crash
in sense of hard-locking (where only Reset switch will revive it again),
but it becomes totally unresponsive due to excessive swapping.

Yesterday I let the fork bomb run for ~1 hour to give the system time to
reach the process limit (the default one, nothing was specified in
limits.conf) and become responsive again, but this did not happen in
this time period. However, it still reacted to Alt+Print+e, which means
all tasks are terminated (and all unsaved work is being lost).

Tomorrow I made an attempt to log into TTY1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) while the fork
bomb was running for ~10 minutes. The TTY appeared after 1-2 minutes,
but actually logging was not finished after ~5-10 minutes when I lost
patience and pressed Alt+Print+e again.

So the system does not "crash" literally but becomes effectively
unusable, with all unsaved work being probably lost.

>
> What does 'ulimit -u' show from a terminal on this system?

31517 is the output. My system has 4 GB of RAM.

Do you think it is appropriate for this case to open a new bug report
against the kernel?

Kind regards,
Jan