Package: procps
Version: 2:4.0.4-9
Severity: normal
It all started when I noticed shenenanigans in the Munin graphs for one of
my Incus system containers. Upon investigating, I noticed:
michael@magrathea:~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache
available
Mem: 4194304 881012 1445916 27680 1894972
3313292
Swap: 0 0 -28
That's weird. Things became clearer (and weirder) when I looked at
/proc/meminfo:
michael@magrathea:~$ grep Swap /proc/meminfo
SwapCached: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 18446744073709551588 kB
That clearly untrue value is 2^64-28. I'm therefore concluding that
something is treating a unsigned 64 bit value as a signed 64 bit value.
After looking at the source, that something would be scale_size(), which
receives an unsigned long...and then casts it to a signed long before doing
anything with it (except when it instead casts it to a float)...
I propose that free(1) should not cast unsigned integers to signed integers.
Yes, I realise we have a few decades before this bug actually starts to
really matter. :P
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 13.0
APT prefers unstable-debug
APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500,
'stable-security-debug'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable-debug'),
(500, 'proposed-updates-debug'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500,
'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable-security'), (500,
'oldoldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldoldstable-security'), (500, 'oldoldstable'),
(500, 'stable'), (490, 'oldstable-debug'), (490, 'oldstable'), (400, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.41+deb13-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU thread; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE,
TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages procps depends on:
ii init-system-helpers 1.68
ii libc6 2.41-12
ii libncursesw6 6.5+20250216-2
ii libproc2-0 2:4.0.4-9
ii libsystemd0 257.7-1
ii libtinfo6 6.5+20250216-2
Versions of packages procps recommends:
ii linux-sysctl-defaults 4.12
ii psmisc 23.7-2
procps suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
