killall unable to find privileged processes

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.

Thanks for looking into this. I see the necessary fix referenced in the ChangeLog here: https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc/blob/master/ChangeLog . But I'm afraid I don't have any more information beyond that, perhaps this version is not released yet, but maybe the Debian maintainers are aware of the timeline for that?

-Lewis

Yeah this isn't released yet in Debian.
The actual change is https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc/commit/38829585c4f5b67c8c2a8cbdf86761a72ace43f6

But it is not that this would be a fix, as you already said "-n 0" can help.
This just switches defaults.

And I doubt we would go ahead so late in the Cosmic release cycle.
While I can feel the pain you have with it (I really do), it is too late now.
And changing the default of something like this would have to be before Feature Freeze (which we passed for quite a while now).

Combining:
- users can get away with "-n 0" if they want
- huge regression risk as behavior changes (killing more by default)
=> I think this makes it non SRUable/Fixable in anything before 19.04

We will pick this up with our usual merge/sync early in 19.04 where other tools relying on the behavior can adapt to the change.

OK, thanks for the information, makes sense. We will work around with /usr/local/bin wrapper for now. It's a bit unfortunate, that the change made upstream for psmisc 23.2,will make the "-n 0" option illegal again, but it's workable for us like this.

Disco (19.04) has 23.2-1:
psmisc (23.2-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release
  * killall: look at all namespaces by default
(...)

We have just started migrating our software stack from xenial to bionic. We run into the problem where command 'killall trafficcontroller' works on xenial but does not work on bionic. I found this issue https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc/-/issues/23 is related to our problem and fixed in version 23.2.

The options "-n 0" works on bionic but we need a solution which works for xenial and bionic at the moment.

Is it possible to backport a newer version of psmisc to bionic?

Backporting a new upstream release to a stable release is not usually what we want (it might introduce new bugs). However, in this case we have a small patch which can be backported to the current version in Bionic. This seems to be what we need:

https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc/-/commit/38829585c4f5b67c8c2a8c

But as discussed above there is an easy workaround to "fix" this issue, so the priority for us is low. If you are willing to contribute to Ubuntu preparing a patch to apply this upstream commit to Bionic we could try to SRU (Stable Release Update) it.