1.166. procps

An updated procps package that fixes various bugs is now available.

The procps package contains a set of system utilities that provide system information. Procps includes ps, free, skill, pkill, pgrep, snice, tload, top, uptime, vmstat, w, watch and pdwx.

This updated procps package includes fixes for the following bugs:

* There was an array in proc/devname.c that was trying to hold bytes in excessive of its capacity, leading to string overflow errors and making the names unusable. A patch has been incorporated that widens the strings so that they include the NUL terminator so that this error no longer occurs. (BZ#469495)

* The ps command defines a fixed width for user names. If a name exceeds this width, the command will revert to displaying the numeric id instead. This behavior was not properly documented in the man page for the command so it has now been added to make users more clearly aware of this behavior. (BZ#471476)

* There was an issue when using the slabtop command with the "-o" option. The command's output would immediately disappear instead of being printed to stdout meaning that the information could not be read. slabtop has now been altered so that output is directed to stdout. As a result, users can now read the output on the terminal screen. (BZ#475963)

* With increases in memory sizes, tools such as vmstat were misaligning the header columns and output for statistics such as free, buff and cache memory. To fix this issue, the "-w" switch has been modified to account for longer figures pertaining to memory statistics. With these wider fields, the columns and their headers are now correctly aligned. (BZ#484789)

* The ps command would occasionally throw a double-free corruption error. This would cause the software to die unexpectedly. This has been fixed by adding a test that looks for zero at the end of a process. As a result, ps no longer aborts unexpectedly. (BZ#487700)

* The "sysctl -a" command was using deprecated syscalls. The software has been modified so that it no longer uses these deprecated calls. As a result, when the archaic code is eventually removed, sysctl will continue to work. A warning message has also been removed from the package's man page. (BZ#501785 BZ#556508)

* The ps command was not producing a core dump when it crashed, making it extremely hard to troubleshoot. Code to handle SIGABRT and SIGSEGV has now been added to the software so that it will produce a core dump if it crashes. As a result, problems will be much easier to trace. (BZ#512857)

* The ps utility's "etime" field shows the elapsed time since a process was started. On heavily-loaded systems, it was possible for a negative value to be returned due to an integer overflow. This has been rectified so that it always correctly returns a positive value, thus providing users with accurate data.. (BZ#556762)

* If the user pressed "f" whilst running top and selected a low number of fields, erroneous and jumbled text would appear at the top of the screen. The top utility has now been modified so that the text clears correctly and the output is displayed as one would expect. (BZ#556777)

* The vmstat utility has a field entitled "Time stolen from a virtual machine." Unfortunately, the addition of the "-w" switch had an adverse impact upon the way this information was output. Consequentially, when vmstat was run in default mode, the field's header was missing and when it was run with the "-w" option, it disappeared altogether. A patch has now been added and, as a result, the field now displays correctly at all times. (BZ#558475)

* The "pmap -x" command was not displaying the resident set size (RSS) for process ids. No figures were appearing in the column. A patch has been applied so that the figures for this field are now correctly calculated and displayed. (BZ#561392)

Users are advised to upgrade to this updated procps package, which resolves these issues.