Procps - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5.5 - TECHNICAL NOTES Manual

1.166. procps

1.166.1. RHBA-2010:0200: bug fix and enhancement update
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.
1730
(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.
1731
(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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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
1735
BZ#556508
page. (BZ#501785
* 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.
1737
(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
1730
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=469495
1731
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=471476
1732
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=475963
1733
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=484789
1734
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=487700
1735
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=501785
1736
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=556508
1737
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=512857
1732
(BZ#475963 )
(BZ#484789
(BZ#487700
1736
)
1733
)
1734
)
procps
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