Hello! I'm the maintainer of wmmemload, a small Window Maker dockapp that monitors memory and swap usage. In response to bug #764356 [1], I've been working to make it sure it works in GNU/kFreeBSD. I recently released a new upstream version in which, after a couple fixes [2, 3], everything appears to work fine.
However, I'm currently in the process of packaging the new version for Debian. In order for wmmemload to monitor the swap usage, it calls kvm_getswapinfo(), which requires that the setgid bit of the binary be set so that /dev/mem can be accessed. Of course, I need to exclude the binary from dh_fixperms in order for this to happen, which results in a Lintian warning. Would it be okay to proceed in this direction and override this warning, or does this pose a security risk? I'm also wondering if a better route might be to use sysctl. This is how wmmemload monitors the memory usage, but I wasn't able to figure out how to also use it for swap usage. I did notice that pstat (which doesn't appear to be included in Debian) does it this way, getting vm.swap_info from sysctl [4]. However, "sysctl vm.swap_info" on the command line doesn't return anything on Debian, so I don't know if it's available. I would greatly appreciate any advice. Thank you! Doug Torrance [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=764356 [2] http://lists.windowmaker.org/dev/msg07293.html [3] http://lists.windowmaker.org/dev/msg07294.html [4] https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.sbin/pstat/pstat.c?revision=225847&view=co
