Ksh (ksh93) Can Lead to a Fork Bomb and Make the System Unresponsive
(Doc ID 1986326.1)
Last updated on APRIL 26, 2023
Applies to:
Solaris Operating System - Version 11.1 and laterInformation in this document applies to any platform.
Symptoms
A system running Solaris 11.x can be affected by this. Should it happen, it behaves with a typical fork bomb exposure:
- The number of processes is rapidly increasing; this could be reported by monitoring software.
- The system responds slowly and later on stops responding at all.
- No possibility to log in, neither on the console nor via network (e.g. via ssh).
A kernel crash dump can be created in that situation by sending a break signal. The crash dump will then show that a ksh shell has one ksh child, and that child has one ksh child and so on:
Note that this tree has many more entries with exactly one ksh child on each level of that sub tree.
Cause
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In this Document
Symptoms |
Cause |
Solution |
References |