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Another old security problemAnother old security problemPosted Sep 10, 2010 21:25 UTC (Fri) by rilder (subscriber, #59804)Parent article: Another old security problem
I am not sure about the unlimited stack size. Most (or all) distro kernels restrict stack size. In my case it is 8 MB which I think is quite sufficient even for large systems.
Are there applications which would *normally* require stack greater than this ?
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Another old security problem Posted Sep 10, 2010 23:14 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]
Absolutely. Many scientific codes regularly exceed this amount of stack.
Another old security problem Posted Sep 11, 2010 0:02 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I would not call scientific codes... normal.. nor the people who run them.
-jef
Another old security problem Posted Sep 11, 2010 4:29 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
Hey! I represent that remark.
Another old security problem Posted Sep 11, 2010 10:50 UTC (Sat) by rilder (subscriber, #59804) [Link]
What I implied through that comments is this - in regular desktop environments it won't happen(cat /proc/**/status | grep -i vmstk didn't reveal more than 100-200 KB) . However, higher stack usage may be visible in applications in enterprise or as you said scientific establishments. Though, in such conditions the applications/packages installed on the host remain stable over time and are carefully chosen with lot of testing, so any of these exploits may not find their place there.
Another old security problem Posted Sep 11, 2010 14:01 UTC (Sat) by spender (subscriber, #23067) [Link]
I'm not sure you understand the meaning of 'exploit' or the difference between soft and hard limits.
-Brad
Another old security problem Posted Sep 15, 2010 9:10 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Rilder made a perfectly good point: applications do not generally need vast stacks (not even Emacs!). Thus it is reasonable to impose a hard limit.
That distros generally impose soft limits instead (for no particularly obvious reason in the case of stack size) is no barrier to imposing a hard limit yourself.
Another old security problem Posted Sep 17, 2010 20:34 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> I am not sure about the unlimited stack size. Most (or all) distro kernels restrict stack size. In my case it is 8 MB which I think is quite sufficient even for large systems.
The *default* for *thread* stacks (which are of fixed size instead of automatically growing like main process stack) is commonly set to 8MB.
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