A Decade of Kill Bugs
On September 24th, 2026, Endcrawl experienced a brief outage while using the kill(1) program. The reporter initially suspected a simple mistake or code error but discovered that the issue stemmed from a bug in kill(1) itself. This bug caused not just one, but a series of related bugs to be shipped in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS through Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
The report investigates the decade-long history of these negative pid killing bugs, starting from their origins in Unix V9 (1986) and tracing the evolution of the kill program through various Linux distributions. The report highlights the specific bug in procps 4.0.4, which caused the deadly outcome of killing all processes on the machine, except for init, when a negative pid was provided due to a misinterpretation of the unrecognized option.
This bug remained undetected until 2026, raising questions about its presence in a long-standing, LTS-released software version.
Written by urgent.news from Lobsters's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
