[Sugar-devel] RAM DoS (was: Re: Fwd: Activity startup idea)

[Luke Faraone]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Sascha Silbe <
sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 11:52:53AM -0500, Wade Brainerd wrote:
>
>  It happens to me at least once every couple of days on build 767...first
>> the
>> UI freezes, then the trackpad stops responding, and if I'm lucky I can
>> manage to Ctrl-Alt-F1 and kill Browse before having to just hard power
>> off.
>>
> This sounds like a security issue to me. Strangely, Bitfrost [1] only seems
> to address CPU and NAND exhaustion, but not RAM.
> No activity should be able to do what you describe above, whether
> intentionally or not.
> While a low memory warning has merits on its own, the underlying issue
> should be fixed as well. The most simple thing to do would be limiting
> segment sizes. Better solutions might tweak priorities for "core" system
> components (like sugar-shell) and/or require kernel changes (e.g. implement
> RLIMIT_RSS handling).


But unfortunately most Sugar installations other than XOs will lack
bitfrost, which is a wider issue that merits further investigation: Should
sugar adopt bitfrost?



-- 
Luke Faraone
http://luke.faraone.cc
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