RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.
Bug 1796043 - Documentation change regarding vmstat manpage
Summary: Documentation change regarding vmstat manpage
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Classification: Red Hat
Component: procps-ng
Version: 7.6
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Linux
unspecified
medium
Target Milestone: rc
: ---
Assignee: Jan Rybar
QA Contact: Karel Volný
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: 1829920
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2020-01-29 13:31 UTC by Rohan
Modified: 2023-03-24 16:53 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version: procps-ng-3.3.10-28.el7
Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
: 1829920 (view as bug list)
Environment:
Last Closed: 2020-09-29 20:36:50 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Red Hat Bugzilla 1374332 0 medium CLOSED /proc/stat reports zero procs_blocked even with D-state processes 2021-02-22 00:41:40 UTC
Red Hat Product Errata RHBA-2020:4017 0 None None None 2020-09-29 20:36:55 UTC

Description Rohan 2020-01-29 13:31:52 UTC
Description of problem:

Vmstat command result shows only blocked process which are waiting for IO to get completed and not all process in 'D/UN' state however the man page of vmstat has incorrect information. 

It is written as,

 b: The number of processes in uninterruptible sleep.

But as per the actual result, it should be written as, 

  b: The number of processes blocked on IO (in uninterruptible sleep.)


Actual Result :

FIELD DESCRIPTION FOR VM MODE
   Procs
       r: The number of runnable processes (running or waiting for run time).
       b: The number of processes in uninterruptible sleep.

Expected Result :

FIELD DESCRIPTION FOR VM MODE
   Procs
       r: The number of runnable processes (running or waiting for run time).
       b: The number of processes blocked on IO (in uninterruptible sleep.)
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Additional info:
  
FYI :

Below is the last update from bugzilla=1374332 hence opening this new documentation BZ 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Snippet from Bugzilla ID=1374332~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I took a peek at the source for vmstat and it's interesting that in the
absence of a /proc/stat "procs_blocked" field (Linux 2.5.46
(approximately) and below), it will iterate through all /proc/<PID>/stat
files looking for 'R' or 'D' fields.  In 2002 code was added to use
/proc/stat "procs_blocked" if it was available.  Nothing in the commit
message for this change makes reference to this field or any change in
reporting semantics.  IMHO, this was a bug introduced into vmstat long
ago... since nobody has complained in the interim, I would suggest
changing the vmstat documentation to match its current implementation:

FIELD DESCRIPTION FOR VM MODE
   Procs
       r: The number of runnable processes (running or waiting for run time).
       b: The number of processes blocked on IO (in uninterruptible sleep.)
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
or something to the effect of explaining that the value is only the
subset of TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE waiting on I/O completion.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Comment 9 errata-xmlrpc 2020-09-29 20:36:50 UTC
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory (procps-ng bug fix and enhancement update), and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2020:4017


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.