RHBA-2009:0950 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

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

Description

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

This updated procps package includes fixes for the following bugs:

• the top utility did not properly clear the screen when only a few fields

were selected, which resulted in superfluous text and strange characters
being displayed. In this updated package, the screen is cleared before
viewing a small number of fields, resolving this issue.

• the slabtop utility for displaying kernel slab cache information, when

used with the '-o' option (for displaying the output once and then
exiting), resulted in the information being displayed and then cleared from
the screen immediately. With this updated package, "slabtop -o" displays
the information once without clearing the screen, an improvement over
previous behavior and more useful for users.

• the ps utility's "etime" field shows the elapsed time since a process was

started. On heavily-loaded systems, it was possible for this value to
return negative due to an integer overflow. This updated package fixes ps
so that it always correctly returns a positive value, thus resolving the issue.

• an integer overflow in values for slabtop's "Active / Total Size (%

used)" field meant that, on systems performing intensive I/O, negative
numbers could be displayed. With this updated package, negative values are
no longer displayed on systems doing I/O-intensive tasks, thus resolving
the problem.

• vmstat's '-p' option failed to display detailed partition information.

With this updated package, "vmstat -p" works as expected.

All users of procps are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which
resolves these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red
Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 433266 - negative ETIME field in ps
• BZ - 440694 - top - strange text after selecting few field
• BZ - 485243 - vmstat -p broken

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)