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8.70. iotop

An updated iotop package that fixes several bugs is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The iotop package provides a program with a UI similar to the "top" utility. The program watches input-output (I/O) usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system.

Bug Fixes

BZ#746240, BZ#908149
Previously, the iotop utility terminated unexpectedly when it was run by a non-root user. This was because a recently-applied patch in CVE-2011-2494 made I/O statistics from the taskstats kernel subsystem accessible only to root users, and iotop did not anticipate that its "taskstats" call could fail when run by a non-root user. This update adds permission checks to iotop, and when the user does not have the necessary permissions, iotop exits with an explanation that root privileges are now required.
BZ#826875
Previously, the iotop utility did not handle platform strings correctly. Consequently, the iotop command could not show the I/O scheduling class and its priority ("PRIO") column on 64-bit PowerPC systems properly. With this update, the bug has been fixed so that the iotop command now shows the "PRIO" column on 64-bit PowerPC systems as expected.
BZ#849559
When an invalid locale was set, the iotop utility failed to start with the following traceback error:
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting
With this update, the underlying source code has been modified. As a result, when an invalid locale is set, the default locale is used instead and a warning about this change is returned.
Users of iotop are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which fixes these bugs.