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Resource Limits

What

Limits on consumption of system resources:

• getrlimit(2), setrlimit(2); ulimit shell command.
  
  
• Per-process attributes; inherited across fork() and exec().
  
  
• Two values: soft limit (actual limit) and hard limit (ceiling for soft limit, modifiable with privilege (CAP_SYS_RESOURCE)).
  
  

Two areas of change in 2.6.x:

• Semantics change for multithreaded programs.
  
  
• New resource limits, or semantics change.
  
  

Quick race through (just forget it if the terms don't mean anything!)

(C) 2006, Michael Kerrisk