Bug#1042544: systemd: Can't increase user default file descriptors (nofile) soft limit above 1024 for gnome-terminal.

[Olivier F. R. Dierick]

Hello,

Thanks for the warning, Luca Boccassi.

I'm aware of the implications of increasing the soft limit. I read many
discussions on the subject on the web while looking for a solution, and
understand the rationale of the Debian decision to set the soft limit
to 1024 and the hard limit to 1048576 in recent releases.
I agree to that and expect that modern, non-select()-using applications
set the soft limit themselves to deliberately indicate that they want
more file descriptors. I filed a bug for Wine as it didn't work as
expected in this case. (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55363)
That should not be discussed here, though.

What I report is that after changing every possible settings I could
find documentation for on the web, the soft limit stays unchanged in
the initial session of a freshly opened gnome-terminal in the graphical
DE. The higher soft limit gets properly set everywhere else as
expected, including opening a new session in the gnome-terminal with
sudo to the same user, or temporarily setting the value with 'ulimit -n
XXXX'. This means to me that something overrides the global settings
from systemd & pam_limits.so in gnome-terminal initialization or a
parent process, or that it takes a path that simply doesn't load the
systemd/pam_limits settings.

I would like to know if I simply missed something in my attempt to
configure a higher soft limit, or if the issue lies within systemd or
another component/application. How can I check that?

Regards.

P.S. Quoting the original message seems broken for me when using the
'reply' link on the Debian Bug page. The generated quote was limited to
a few lines of my own quoted message in your reply. I removed it as it
was meaningless.
-- 
        Olivier F. R. Dierick
        o.dierick at piezo-forte.be