killall unable to find privileged processes
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
psmisc (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Low
|
Unassigned | ||
Bionic |
Triaged
|
Low
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Hello-
In Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, we have psmisc version 23.1. In this version, the default for "killall" is to kill processes in the current namespace only, and this causes killall to attempt to read /proc/$pid/ns/pid for every process. If a process is privileged (setuid, or has capabilities granted), then /proc/$pid/ns is not readable and killall is not able to match this process. So e.g. "killall ping" fails to kill anything even if a ping is running. It seems that psmisc may have recognized this issue, as in 23.2 the default was changed back to killing in all namespaces and not trying to read the namespace information from /proc. In the meantime, killall requires the "-n 0" argument as a workaround.
This issue is pretty impactful, at least for us, as it requires finding all instances of killall and adding the extra argument... is it possible to get psmisc version upped to 23.2? Thanks...
-Lewis
Changed in psmisc (Ubuntu): | |
status: | Incomplete → Triaged |
importance: | Undecided → Low |
Hi and thanks for taking the time to file a bug.
It looks like this package is directly synced from Debian and it looks like we have the latest version from Debian. I went looking for the upstream repo and the latest version I saw was 23.1:
https:/ /gitlab. com/psmisc/ psmisc/ tags
From where did you find a newer version?
Once that is known, a request can be made to the Debian maintainers to bump the version and Ubuntu can sync that version.