[Rd] R process killed when allocating too large matrix (Mac OS X)

Jeroen Ooms jeroen.ooms at stat.ucla.edu
Thu May 12 12:07:29 CEST 2016


On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Martin Maechler
<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> My conclusion was I could not use the RAppArmor package.
>
> (But that's wrong: For the  rlimit*()  functions below, one do
>  *NOT* need an AppArmor-enabled version of Linux !)

Yes, it is a relatively recent (unadvertised) feature that the package
now builds on linux systems without libapparmor. I agree this names
the package name confusing. I'll make at least that warning more
informative.

Some background: When I started the package (5 years ago) I expected
that soon all linux distributions would have the apparmor module which
has been in the kernel since 2.6.36. However Redhat is explicitly
disabling it because they are pushing a competing MAC system (SELinux)
which they develop together with the NSA, and they really want you to
use this instead (and only this!).

> I gather that all of these are *not* Apparmor related... so could/should maybe rather migrate into a lightweight package not mentioning AppArmor ?

I agree, it has been on the to do list for a while; Kirill and me were
talking yesterday about what would be the best route to take:

 - A small package with only the rlimit bindings
 - or: A 'linux' package with bindings to anything in the kernel,
including rlimit, but possibly other system tools.
 - or: A package targeting POSIX/unix with standard functionality that
is also available on OSX/BSD.

>From my experience, windows is pretty useless for this kind of stuff.



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