kern/72680: (Kernel Panic) FreeBSD 5.3 Does not survive fork bombing

[David Schultz]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> The following reply was made to PR kern/72680; it has been noted by GNATS.
> 
> From: Nikolas Britton <nbritton23 at earthlink.net>
> To: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org, freebsd at nbritton.org
> Cc:  
> Subject: Re: kern/72680: (Kernel Panic) FreeBSD 5.3 Does not survive fork
>  bombing
> Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 22:26:18 -0500
> 
>  Sorry to have wasted your time but after 3 hours of fork bombing and 
>  trying everthing else under the sun, I could not get FreeBSD to panic 
>  with the new debug kernel. I guess it was just a fluke or I was doing 
>  the wrong thing at the right time (when it paniced the first time it was 
>  in the middle of a portupgrade -arR, X session, etc.). here is a list of 
>  the many error messages I receviced (if it helps any):

No worries.  In the future, though, it would help if you could
provide more information in problem reports.  The best thing to do
(short of submitting a patch to fix the bug) is to provide the
panic message, backtrace, anything noteworthy about your kernel
config, and steps to reproduce the problem.  If the problem is
hard to reproduce, we minimally need a panic message or something
that will tell us *where* something went wrong.

>  maxproc limit exceeded
>  kern.ipc.maxpipekva exceeded
>  swap_pager: out of swap space
>  swap_pager_getswapspace
>  Pipe call failed: bad file descriptor
>  kern.maxfiles limit exceeded
>  Can't open /dev/null: Too meny open files in the system
>  Connot fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Given that you've hit just about every *other* resource limit in
the system, my guess is that you also ran out of KVA or reached
the limit on the kmem_map size.  If this is a real problem, you
should set administrative limits to ensure that you do not run out
of swap space and then, if needed, adjust some of the other limits
as well.