It has been thought that the per-user file descriptors limit would also
limit the resources that a normal user can request via the epoll
interface. Vegard Nossum reported a very simple program (a modified
version attached) that can make a normal user to request a pretty large
amount of kernel memory, well within the its maximum number of fds. To
solve such problem, default limits are now imposed, and /proc based
configuration has been introduced. A new directory has been created,
named /proc/sys/fs/epoll/ and inside there, there are two configuration
points:
max_user_instances = Maximum number of devices - per user
max_user_watches = Maximum number of "watched" fds - per user
The current default for "max_user_watches" limits the memory used by epoll
to store "watches", to 1/32 of the amount of the low RAM. As example, a
256MB 32bit machine, will have "max_user_watches" set to roughly 90000.
That should be enough to not break existing heavy epoll users. The
default value for "max_user_instances" is set to 128, that should be
enough too.
This also changes the userspace, because a new error code can now come out
from EPOLL_CTL_ADD (-ENOSPC). The EMFILE from epoll_create() was already
listed, so that should be ok.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: use get_current_user()]
Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Cc: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Vegard Nossum <vegardno@ifi.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
7ef9964e6d