Ever since I upgraded to Linux 5.10 (from 5.4), I am frequently, but not always, getting random failures from pkill/pgrep (anything that uses pgreps grep functionality): > pkill: cannot allocate 4611686018427387903 bytes I traced this back to this fix upstream, which has not made it into a release yet: https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/bb96fc42956c9ed926a1b958ab715f8b4a663dec Adding that patch to my user patches resolves the issue. Since the next release might still be a while away, and then won't be instantly stabilized, backporting that patch might be a good idea for users of newer kernels.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=34d263dddc98200ed6fefffd0bb8b0fcb37762e7 commit 34d263dddc98200ed6fefffd0bb8b0fcb37762e7 Author: Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2021-01-25 22:14:17 +0000 Commit: Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2021-01-25 22:16:42 +0000 sys-process/procps: Revbump to fix pgrep/pkill with kernel-5.10+ Reported-by: Timo Rothenpieler <timo@rothenpieler.org> Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/767217 Package-Manager: Portage-3.0.14, Repoman-3.0.2 Signed-off-by: Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> .../procps-3.3.16-SC_ARG_MAX_sanity_check.patch | 60 +++++++++++++++ sys-process/procps/procps-3.3.16-r3.ebuild | 88 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 148 insertions(+)