On a 32-bit x86 kernel with syscall auditing enabled, syscall(1000) will cause an OOPS. This problem goes at least as far back as Linux 3.11 and appears to be present in Linux 3.15 as well. I suspect that this bug is very old. In order to see this bug, you'll need syscall auditing on (auditctl -e 1 will do that) and you'll need 'sep' in flags in /proc/cpuinfo. That means that qemu -cpu qemu64 will not be exposed to this bug, but qemu -cpu host will on any recent CPU. Mitigations include: - Running under ptrace or strace. - Using any seccomp filter at all (phew!) - Turning off SEP (which is a big slowdown on all syscalls) - auditctl -a task,never I'd be rather surprised if this can be used for anything other than DoS, although the same underlying bug could potentially have more serious consequences. This bug was found (inadvertently, I presume) by Toralf Förster. The patch here: http://lkml.kernel.org/g/CALCETrW7U4AHG-a9oPbOt31z3wgzhjSu8b+yGpdM4+vNinKgsA @mail.gmail.com is reported to fix the bug, but it should not be considered to be well-tested. --Andy