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answers:

1

What is the SIGKILL permissions policy?

I assume I can't kill something of the kernel, or of some other user, while running on non-root, but I haven't found any document about this.

+2  A: 

From http://linux.die.net/man/2/kill :

For a process to have permission to send a signal it must either be privileged (under Linux: have the CAP_KILL capability), or the real or effective user ID of the sending process must equal the real or saved set-user-ID of the target process. In the case of SIGCONT it suffices when the sending and receiving processes belong to the same session.

alberge
Also, kernel threads and init will ignore SIGKILL.
bdonlan