artswrapper defanged

[Rob Kaper]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 09:22:47AM +0200, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> The _combination_ of these two purposes leads to a straightforward "local
> denial of service attack": you let artsd compute lots of things. Since artsd
> monitors its own CPU usage, you can only safely take away 90% of the CPU usage
> a system has. Solution: start another artsd. Then you can take away 100% of
> the CPU usage a system has. So a non root user can produce a system hang in
> tiny shell script (will not post it here).

So make artsd as singleton. It's whole purpose is (well, for 99.9% of the
end users not interested in the detailed featureS) to make multiple sound
streams and put them onto one device. It has little purpose to do this
multiple times.

Or, for a multi-user solution, all user-artsds should be managed by a
process which ensures the combined instances do not exceed a certain amount
of CPU usage.

I've been wondering why the kernel cannot reserve a certain amount of
RAM/CPU for certain process trees, like it can with harddisk space (there's
5% reserved for root). I'd love to tell my system that it should always keep
10% CPU/RAM reserved for my sshd and child processes as well as anything on
tty1. That way there would be no possible way to keep me from administrating
my machine, because I always have reserved CPU/RAM for administrative tasks.

(if anyone has any idea how to accomplish something like that, let me know)

Rob
-- 
Rob Kaper     | Gimme some love, gimme some skin,
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