quick question: using ulimit to control stack size

[veraction]

I had a C program using a lot of resources & it would get stack overflows. I wanted to increase stack. eventually I found the way to by using

To show stack size:

$ulimit -s
To change stack size:

$ulimit -s bytes

but why is it that once I start a new terminal, I can only change the stack change once?



$ ulimit -s
8192
$ ulimit -s 6000
$ ulimit -s
6000
$ ulimit -s 6005
bash: ulimit: stack size: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted


(note, it seems like each terminal has its own settings for ulimit... if I set it in one, it doesn't affect the other terminal, etc)

[coredump]

Yes, it's a per-process limit, so one terminal session won't affect another.

But why it's failing on the second try, I don't know. Does the 'man' page say anything about it? Or the 'man' page for the underlying system call?

[cylon359]

You should try fix your program to use less stack, and start allocating via malloc

[veraction]

Its a GMP issue: http://www.swox.com/gmp/#FAQ Q3

Guess malloc would work, as that GMP link says, but makes it slower (and due to nature of the problem I'm working on, I want it to go fast & and utilize more than 8MB -- default).

Anyways, I don't seem to have a man page entry for ulimit on my machine.I found a link here: http://www.ss64.com/bash/ulimit.html but doesn't say why I can't change it twice in same terminal.

Not really an issue. Was just wondering

[LordHunter317]

[edit]Need to lookup correct information

[cylon359]

Well, in that case, try running ulimit through sudo...

[veraction]

Ah, well, I guess I can keep lowering it, but can only raise it once:



$ ulimit -s
8192
$ ulimit -s 5000
$ ulimit -s
5000
$ ulimit -s 4000
$ ulimit -s
4000
$ ulimit -s 6000
bash: ulimit: stack size: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted
$ sudo ulimit -s 6000
Password:
sudo: ulimit: command not found

[coredump]

OK, the man page for 'ulimit' is part of 'bash', so do 'man bash' and then search (using '/') for 'ulimit'. Not that it helps much!

The underlying system call is no longer called 'ulimit' but is now 'setrlimit'. But that man page is missing from Ubuntu (at least on my Mac/PowerPC install of 5.04). So, on another Linux box (Slackware 10.1), I got these excerpts:


The soft limit is the value that the kernel enforces for
the corresponding resource. The hard limit acts as a
ceiling for the soft limit: an unprivileged process may
only set its soft limit to a value in the range from 0 up
to the hard limit, and (irreversibly) lower its hard
limit. A privileged process may make arbitrary changes to
either limit value.


RLIMIT_STACK
The maximum size of the process stack, in bytes.
Upon reaching this limit, a SIGSEGV signal is gen*
erated. To handle this signal, a process must
employ an alternate signal stack (sigaltstack(2)).


The above struct was taken from BSD 4.3 Reno. Not all
fields are meaningful under Linux. Right now (Linux 2.4)
only the fields ru_utime, ru_stime, ru_minflt, ru_majflt,
and ru_nswap are maintained.

So, I think you'll need to check the man page for 'setrlimit' on a machine with a 2.6 kernel, to see if that last paragraph still applies.

I also did dome more testing with 'ulimit' from the command line, and it seems you can use 'ulimit' a second time, but only to reduce your stack size -- not increase it! So I think that the first paragraph above has something to do with this, where it mentions 'privileged processes'. This means processes owned by 'root', of course, which can set their limits any way they want. Whereas ordinary user processes cannot, and it appears that they can only reduce limits, not increase them.

Hope this all makes sense!

[cylon359]

Try to use setrlimit in your code (man setrlimit)?

However, you'll have to setuid your binary to after giving it root ownership...