kern.ngroups question

[Julian Elischer]

Reuben A. Popp wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Can someone explain to me the rationale behind having ngroups_max set to 16 by 
> default?
> 

NFS only supports this much by default (from memory).

Samba (in the guise of Jeremy Allison)
has asked us to follow Linux's lead and support an arbitrary number of Groups
but it hasn't happened yet, Partly due to the question of 
"what to do about NFS" and partly just due to ENOTIME.

> I came across this issue originally when working on our Samba implementation 
> (samba-3 out of ports, running on 6-STABLE).  We have some users that belong 
> to a number of groups, some of whom need to belong to more groups than the 
> defined hard limit.  On doing a little research, I did come across the PR 
> detailed in http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/108552, and 
> continued reading the linked thread from March 2003, however this really 
> doesn't explain why the limit is set to 16.  
> 
> Can one adjust the value in syslimits.h on a system and then rebuild 
> world/ports with the expectation this will work, or is the issue more 
> involved then that?  Is (or has) there any discussion on raising that number 
> to a larger value?
> 
> Thanks in advance (doubly so if this is a lame question)
> Reuben 
>