[TAG] Crashing the system (Was Re: Help please :( )

[MNZ]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 07:18:25AM -0800, Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:
> > On the contrary, this is quite useful to crash a system. Long Long ago, when
> > the earth was young and so was I, I did this on visual basic. Loop forever
> > creating children that loop forever creating children that loop forever 
> > creating children.... It was fun watching the screen fill up.
> 
> There is a different program for crashing the system called "crashme"
> which works as follows:
> 
> 1. Trap all signals
> 2. Generate a random sequence of bytes.
> 3. Treat that as code by jumping into it.
> 4. Loop if necessary.
> 
> This was used as proof of concept for Linux in the early days (when
> it was still being compared to Minix-386). I seem to recall that
> Linux (1.0) did not crash whereas Minix-386 did. 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kapil.

You don't need all that complexity(!) to crash wind0ze. A simple program that
merely runs itself is enough. About linux, well sometimes I wonder if it is
crashable. The only one time it died on me was long ago, kjournald said 
something then it just crashed. As to whether or not the simple call-myself 
program can crash linux, I'm not sure.

-- 
//MNZ\\  "We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are"
							-- Leonard Shelby