Dear Linus,

We all have "friends" who ran into production issues with the default "ulimit -n" under Linux.

We never reaped any benefits from such a limit. It simply never seemed to make any kind of sense in our modern world.

We've painfully discovered that /etc/security/limits.conf was only applied by PAM, and PAM wasn't involved for some of our services.

We've been playing Whac-A-Mole with our infrastructures, as our distributions did not provide us with any global mechanism to work around that limit.

Please merge the fix.

Yours faithfully,

-- 
The On Call rotation