I'm having difficulty getting the vmstat utility to work on a server I recently built.

It is running Debian "woody" with a custom compiled 2.6.7 kernel.

I get the following error when running "vmstat" at prompt:

procs memory swap io system cpu
r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id
Segmentation fault

procps is install as at the following level according to dpkg:

ii procps 2.0.7-8.woody1 The /proc file system utilities.

I've tried re-installing the procps package just in case there were some broken files. However, this didn't make a difference.

I checked /proc/vmstat and compared it with another server where vmstat is working. A number of the values are zero. While this may not be a fair comparison (server versus a workstation in this case), could this point to an option that wasn't selected during kernel compile time?

Any suggestions on a resolution would be greatly appreciated.

Matt