Dropbear

Tag: procps

  • Sneak peek of top graphs

    Jim has been busy as part of the procps-ng team that looks after top. Basically all the changes you find in top from around 2.7 or so are by him. Not satisfied enough with fixing top, making it faster and showing more fields, he has given us CPU and memory graphs.

    He also thinks I don’t have enough colours (or as he would put it colors) on my top output so I’ve posted what the new top looks like for me so you can see the graphs and he can see my colours.

    top, with colours
    top, with colours

     

    I think it is both colourful and useful addition. The colours have been available for a while now and the graphs will appear in the next upstream release of procps-ng.

     

  • procps-ng 3.3.9

    Procps version 3.3.9 was released today.  As there has been some API changes and fixes which means the library has changed again.  There is a fine balance between fixing or enhancing library functions and keeping the API stable, with the added problem it wasn’t a terribly good one to start with.

    Besides the API change, the following changes were made:

    • kernel namespaces support added to skill, pgrep, ps and top
    • pidof was reimplemented from scratch (replacing sysvinit pidof)
    • ps has configurable libselinux support (–enable-libselinux)
    • ps provides for display of systemd slice unit (–with-systemd)
    • free can once again report non-zero ‘shared’ memory
    • sysctl provides ‘–system’ to ignore missing /etc/sysctl.conf
    • watch interval capacity was increased – debian #720445
    • pwdx no longer fails in a nonexistent locale – debian #718766
    • top clarified summary area Mem/Swap stats – debian #718670
    • top batch mode -w (width) abend fixed – debian #721204
    • top man page removed ‘Bd/Ed’ mdoc macros – debian #725713
    • top no longer clears screen at exit – redhat #977561
    • top adapted to potential libnuma stderr message – redhat #998678
    • top added missing batch mode newline – redhat #1008674

    Tar file is at sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/procps-ng/files/Production/

  • procps-ng 3.3.7 Released

    procps-ng version 3.3.7 was released today.  It has some new and interesting features in the top program that Jim has been busy working on.  There is a new filter feature which can exclude fields that match a value for example. The remainder of the changes are small bug fixes and getting the compile warnings count down with -Wall enabled. The library revision was updated but this did not involve an API or ABI change.

    procps-ng can be downloaded off the sourceforge page which has the current and previous releases stored there. Alternatively you can visit our gitorious page if git fetch is more your thing. Debian packages will be going into experimental until the freeze is over and we get things unblocked.

  • procps 3.3.6 and Mudlet 2.0

    Mudlet - Graphical MUD clientYesterday was a busy Debian day for me with the release of not one but two packages.

    procps

    procps version 3.3.6 was released both as an upstream and a Debian package.  While there were many bug fixes in this release, the main new feature for it was the top inspect feature.

    The top inspect feature allows you to run top in the normal way then you can inspect a specific process you have selected within top for more information.  Examples of this include fuser or lsof type output to see what files or libraries are open but really the limit is how clever the operator is and how often you would need this information.  Even scripts can be run off this feature if you have some customised or cooked output you need to see.  Once the output is there, you can search for text.

    There will be a small hold-up with the Debian packages as the section for the  library has been moved to libs, where it should be. At least I think that’s why there is a delay.

    procps infrastructure

    procps currently has only an email list and a gitorious git repository.  While this works most of the time, there are two main problems with this setup.

    The first is that the only two ways you can report bugs is send an email to the list or create a git merge request. The email has the problem with tracking and gathering history while the git sets the bar pretty high for reporting something has gone wrong.

    Second problem is there is no tarball file repository.  gitorious does have the feature of downloading tarballs of the tag checkpoints, but this is the raw repository.  When you make a tarball with “make dist” there are some generated files included in the tarball that don’t appear in the gitorious ones, which means its not a simple for some as you expect.

    So I’ll be creating a project for these two features soon.  Not sure where they will be but I use sourceforge for both these for a few other projects so that might be where they end up.

     

    Mudlet

    Mudlet, the multi-user dungeon or MUD client, has finally made it to version 2.0!  It looks a lot more stable and polished at least from the scripting side than the previous RC versions but has all the features that we’ve come to expect with it.  The most important thing is that the developers have finally put a line in the sand and said “this is version 2.0”.  The Debian package was uploaded yesterday and should be on its way to your local mirror soon.

     

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  • procps-ng 3.3.3 released

    top
    Top in colour mode

    This weekend procps-ng version 3.3.3 was tagged and released for distribution.  There have been many patches and fixes involved in this release as we move from an unchanging static sort of code into something that is easier to maintain and build on various architectures.  The good thing is I’m down to 1 or 2 patches in the Debian archive which is a big change from the 30 or 40-odd I used to carry.  For the sole metric of getting that number down, the project fork has been a success.

     

    There were some post-release bugs I found and these were more to do with the various options turned on or off rather than what you’d see if you did the basic ./configure && make.  One of them was how the version numbers are defined in git, but would only appear if certain files were older than others (such as aclocal.m4 versus config.h.in)  Others were when certain features were turned on.  The make check doesn’t see all of this because it uses the default configure flags.

    One annoying thing of the autotools is conditionally installing man pages. This is where you don’t or cannot compile a binary so you don’t install the corresponding man page.  The automake documentation is of course obscure about this but I cannot see a way of distributing only a man page, so we have this fiddle where a file goes into dist_man_MANS or EXTRA_DIST depending.

    Interestingly, there has been some bike-shedding around Fedora-land (see the link below) regarding the name procps-ng versus procps.  Debian is lucky that we do have different upstream and package names (though not ideal) so apt-get install procps still gives you procps.  There also has been discussion about merging procps-ng into util-linux whichin the short-term won’t be happening.

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  • procps-ng 3.3.0 Released

    Tonight procps-ng, a fork of procps by developers from Debian, Fedora and SuSE was released.  The main goal of the team for this release was to reduce the number of patches we all carry in our respective distributions and learn from each other.  As an added bonus, we had one of the original authors of top, Jim, join the team and greatly enhance top.

    While the upstream version is now released, the Debian package is not quite ready to go as it involves removing a lot of patches and adjusting some others.  The build system is also now a reasonably standard (but different to previous) setup that means the packing scripts need adjusting.

    The best place to find out what is different is the procps NEWS file. The source code is available from Gitorious  at https://gitorious.org/procps

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  • procps: Third time lucky

    OK, ok, i got a chroot and pbuilder now. So that should, I hope stop any more FTBFS bugs about missing depdendencies.

    procps got uploaded that fixes some important bugs, but mainly they were small fiddly things. About the most significant enhancement was pmap now has a real working -x flag.  It looks a lot like some of the other pmap programs out there and shows the RSS and Dirty bytes per map. Let me know if its useful or not.

    However there still is 48 bugs in the package, so if you’re feeling game wander over to procps bug page and have a look around, but here are some more interesting ones, such as why would a process start time be earlier than the boot time? Bug 408879 has this problem

    Now, a nice can of worms is in a Linux system, what is free memory?  What should the “free” program report?  Currently free just reports what it sees in /proc, but in Bug 565518 should the slab count be taken out?  I certainly won’t be making any Debian-specific changes here as you could get different numbers depending on your distribution, or even worse the age of you Debian system.

    procps is also my first attempt at using git-buildpackage which I found very helpful. There was one problem with it and that is how it works with the quilt patch program. If the quilt patches are applied, git doesn’t know this and says all the files have changed. I know its how these two programs are supposed to work but its a little annoying.

  • Linux load numbers

    Many utilities, such as top in [procps](http://procps.sf.net/) display the percentages of time the cpu is busy doing things such as userland programs, system calls or just idle. This page describes the file /proc/stat and how programs interpret the numbers they find.

    I am the [Debian](http://www.debian.org/ maintainer for procps which contains top. Often I get bug reports about those numbers that appear at the top of top (called the summary area) so hopefully it will
    help Debian users understand it too.

    ##The /proc/stat file
    The file /proc/stat file is where the cpu numbers come from. As I am typing this, my single Athlon cpu computer running Linux 2.6.15 had the first two lines of the file looking like:

    $ grep ^cpu /proc/stat
cpu  217174 10002 105629 7692822 90422 6491 22673 0
cpu0 217174 10002 105629 7692822 90422 6491 22673 0

    The first thing you can see is I have 1 cpu, as there is only the aggregate line (starting with cpu) and then one individual cpu line (showing cpu0). Each field is describing how much time the cpu is been in various states, the values are in jiffies (more about them later). From left to right, the values are:

    * Userland – running normal programs
    * Nice – running niced programs
    * System – running processes at the system level, eg the kernel
    * Idle – CPU is doing nothing (running idle task)
    * IOwait – CPU is waiting for IO to come back
    * irq – servicing a hardware interrupt
    * softirq – servicing a software interrupt
    * Steal – To do with virtual machines, this cpu is waiting for the others

    ##Jiffies
    Quite often the kernel doesn’t count time in seconds, but counts them in a unit called jiffies. There is a concept of a value called Hz or Hertz which is the number of jiffies in a second. Happily for us, we’re only
    looking at percentages, so it doesn’t really matter.