Re: From the moderator: READ Please

[rhaas () cygnus arc nasa gov (Robert M. Haas)]

> Most likely it is so that sendmail can determine the load average. It
> has a feature that it will start queueing everything (rather than
> delivering immediately) at one load threshhold, and another threshhold
> at which it will begin refusing connections altogether. On some
> systems, there is a system call to get the load average through the
> kernel. On those where there is not, it is necessary to read /dev/kmem
> to get this information.

Sendmail runs as root, though.  I would think setgid kmem privileges
would be superfluous.

...Robert