On my system ulimit -u
reports 63172
and /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max
reports 32768
.
Why is it that the value for ulimit -u
is higher than the kernel's value? From my understanding, ulimit -u
shows the max processes a user can have, not system-wide. pid_max
is supposed to be system-wide via the kernel. It seems wrong to me that ulimit -u
is higher than pid_max
, wouldn't this mean that a user could cause PIDs to wrap around if they spawned enough processes? Also, if the pid_max
value is hit by something a user is doing, won't that cause the No more processes error
to occur?