In System Monitor, why the app-specific upload/download rates might not work?

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1

I’m talking about the following columns and chart:

sRjXd
sRjXd1026×607 97.9 KB

My experience varies system-by-system, although all systems were running Plasma 5.27.7 at the time:

  • Debian testing: no table columns (couldn’t even add them), chart present but dead;
  • openSUSE Tumbleweed: everything present and works (screenshot above);
  • Fedora 38: columns present, chart present, nothing works.

Possible reasons for not working?

2

I’m a bit surprised with the dead silence :slight_smile:

Is this a wrong place to ask questions like this? Where better to ask them, then?

3

No you’re in the right place, but this is all volunteer-based so it depends on if someone who knows the answer (or knows where to look) hasn’t come across the question yet :frowning: Sorry!

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4

I’d appreciate knowing at least whether this thing works for KDE devs :slight_smile:

Initially I was really glad to find this; if I’m not mistaken other DEs don’t have it in their process monitors as of today, so it looked like a valuable extra.

Now it looks like I might be the only one trying it out :smiley:

5

For those columns to appear, it requires libksysguard to be build with libpcap which is a recommended dependency CMakeLists.txt · master · Plasma / libksysguard · GitLab.

In order for it to correctly work the program needs special privileges CAP_NET_RAW. We try to set it in the build process via libcap and/or the distro needs to handle it specially processcore/plugins/network/helper/CMakeLists.txt · master · Plasma / libksysguard · GitLab

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6

Thanks much. Details provided helped me to get this working. Shortly, the problems weren’t with libpcap missing nor build options.

On Debian trixie, the whole libkf5sysguard-bin package containing the ksgrd_network_helper executable seems to be missing from the default KDE dependency tree. Thus both columns and the chart started working after simply apt install libkf5sysguard-bin.

On Fedora 38, ksgrd_network_helper is present (installed with the package libksysguard) but indeed missing the cap_net_raw capability. So making it work is a matter of setcap cap_net_raw+ep /usr/libexec/ksysguard/ksgrd_network_helper.

Not sure why each of these two distros hasn’t made this work out of the box.

Thanks again!

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7

More than likely no one knew until you dug it up. If you have the time, posting the same text you wrote into a packaging bugreport against Debian/Fedora would help them fix this out of the box :slight_smile:

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8

Yeah, thinking about this, haven’t fully figured out the simplest way to report yet.

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