Apps are increasingly using more than 1024 file descriptors.  See
discussion in several distro bug trackers, e.g.  BugLink:
http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/663090
https://issues.rpath.com/browse/RPL-2054

You don't want to raise the default soft limit, since that might break
apps that use select(), but it's safe to raise the default hard limit;
that way, apps that know they need lots of file descriptors can raise
their soft limit without needing root, and without user intervention.

Ubuntu is doing this with a kernel change because they have a policy of
not changing kernel defaults in userland.

While 4096 might not be enough for *all* apps, it seems to be plenty for
the apps I've seen lately that are unhappy with 1024.
Signed-off-by: Tim Gardner <tim.gardner@canonical.com>
Cc: Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>