From: Vlastimil Babka
> Sent: 22 September 2016 18:55
...
> So in the case of select() it seems like the memory we need 6 bits per file
> descriptor, multiplied by the highest possible file descriptor (nfds) as
> passed
> to the syscall. According to the man page of select:
>
> EINVAL nfds is negative or exceeds the RLIMIT_NOFILE resource limit
> (see
> getrlimit(2)).
That second clause is relatively recent.
> The code actually seems to silently cap the value instead of returning EINVAL
> though? (IIUC):
>
> /* max_fds can increase, so grab it once to avoid race */
> rcu_read_lock();
> fdt = files_fdtable(current->files);
> max_fds = fdt->max_fds;
> rcu_read_unlock();
> if (n > max_fds)
> n = max_fds;
>
> The default for this cap seems to be 1024 where I checked (again, IIUC, it's
> what ulimit -n returns?). I wasn't able to change it to more than 2048, which
> makes the bitmaps still below PAGE_SIZE.
>
> So if I get that right, the system admin would have to allow really large
> RLIMIT_NOFILE to even make vmalloc() possible here. So I don't see it as a
> large
> concern?
4k open files isn't that many.
Especially for programs that are using pipes to emulate windows events.
I suspect that fdt->max_fds is an upper bound for the highest fd the
process has open - not the RLIMIT_NOFILE value.
select() shouldn't be silently ignoring large values of 'n' unless
the fd_set bits are zero.
Of course, select does scale well for high numbered fds
and neither poll nor select scale well for large numbers of fds.
David
