Re: a program named spoon

[jason () dickory sdsu edu (Jason Matthews)]

On Mon, 5 Dec 1994, Doug Hughes wrote:

> I remember something about a program named spoon. Seems to be a
> hacker C program of some sort that eats up a systems resources.
> Does anybody know the origin of this program? We've discovered
> a couple of users with binary only and were wondering exactly
> what it does. Source would be helpful, but not necessary. I'm
> guessing it mallocs all available memory for a specified period
> of time.  
>  Was it this list?

I have two guesses:
        1) It forks repeatedly thereby consuming resources.
        2) It makes use of malloc() and allocates all the available
           virtual memory until it detects it is within a certain percentage
           of the physical limit and idles in the background.

BTW, are you sure this is not some sort of page bomb where the program
allocates and then deallocates memory in attempt to force the kernel to
'kill' processes.


Jason

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jason () dickory sdsu edu                         San Diego State University
jason () mentor sdsu edu                    College of Engineering
jason () BOOM extern ucsd edu               Electrical*Computer Engineering 
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