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It's not specifically the lack of cpu timeslices that crowds out other programs, it's more like exhaustion of all the OS resources (process table fills up, file table fills up, memory runs out, swap death etc).

Sure if you carefully made everything fork-bomb-resistant then a cpu quota would be a part of it. Container systems use fork bombs as basic test cases.

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I'm surprised that this wasn't one of the primary goals of cgroups: the ability to group "all userspace processes" into one cgroup, and then say that that cgroup can in sum only use so much CPU, so many processes, so many inodes, etc. You know, a control plane/data plane separation, without requiring hypervision.

It is. Cgroup provides limits for memory, CPU time. We already have other accounting mechanisms for processes/threads (rlimits) and for inodes and disk space (disk quota systems). We've had those for ages. I imagine there will be more work to integrate these various accounting mechanisms with cgroup as the work continues.

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