Bug#917167: Fwd: Bug#917167: systemd: 240 breaks kde (rakes ages to launch)

[Fanael Linithien]

Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:
> For processes that are spawned by PID 1, the limits are set differently
> though, so the unlimited rlimit for PID 1 should have no effect on other
> processes.
>
> Problem is, pam_limits.so in Debian ships a custom patch, which reads
> the limits from PID 1 and set those for login sessions.

Yeah, attaching gdb to kdeinit5 shows that rlim_max is 2^30, so not
quite INT_MAX, but still very high.

> So, ultimately, it's both a bug in pam_limits but also kinit, which
> should behave more sensibly if rlimit is set to a high value.

Arguably it's a bug in linux in that it's incapable of spawning a new
process without inheriting file descriptors from the caller, thus
requiring ugly workarounds like this ;)

> We can work around that in systemd though, which is what I plan to do
> for the time being.
>
> For a (temporary) workaround you can create a file
> /etc/security/limits.d/systemd.conf containing:
>
> * hard nofile 524288
>
> This will make pam_limits behave properly.

Thanks!