Here is a demonstration as requested in Discourse. These steps were run
on a stock image of Ubuntu Impish taken from https://cloud-
images.ubuntu.com/impish/current/.
Showing the inconsistent behavior of the default settings if the goal is
private home directories. Both adduser and useradd creat
I created a very simple patch that allocates a larger buffer for the
contents of /proc//status, and avoids the infinite loop scenario.
The buffer could still conceivably fill up, but ps at least won't crash.
A better solution would be to dynamically allocate memory when reading
/proc//* , but that
I'm not sure the best way to fix this, but I have located the problem.
I've found this bug to be caused by a Debian patch
"ps_supgid_display.patch" which was initially from the bug report at
http://bugs.debian.org/506303
When any /proc//status has more than 1024 characters before the end
of the G
I've filed a procps bug at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/procps/+bug/1150413
It looks like too many groups in /proc//status, combined with a
Debian patch to procps will cause an infinite loop that keeps allocating
more and more memory until it fails.
--
You received this bug notifica
Public bug reported:
Both ps and pgrep exit with an error like "xrealloc: realloc(1073741824)
failedCannot allocate memory" if there is a process owned by a user with
a large number of groups.
I suspect this was introduced with a recent kernel patch which no longer
limits the number of groups ret
Looking at the changelog, I strongly suspect this bug was introduced by
the patch "pid/status: show all supplementary groups". Now that more
groups are being returned for a process, ps is unable to handle it.
I'll look at filing a bug with procps, as that may be better than
reverting this patch.
I've also been experiencing this since updating to linux-
image-3.2.0-38-generic as part of applying 12.04.2 updates to my
servers. I put similar strace info into a comment at
http://askubuntu.com/questions/258180/why-does-running-ps-results-in-
cannot-allocate-memory-error .
I've found the probl
