Iotop Crashes When Not Run As Root

Welcome to another an-update-broke-me-box post. Iotop now requires root access:

:~$ iotop -o
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/iotop", line 16, in <module>
main()
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/iotop/netlink.py", line 229, in recv
raise err
OSError: Netlink error: Operation not permitted (1)

To fix it, run iotop as root:

sudo iotop -o

There’s a lively debate here between the iotop author, Guillaume Chazarain, and Linus Torvalds  on the pros and cons of requiring root access for throughput statistics. It’s another linux developer classic with Linus using words like abortion, castration, disaster, utter crap… makes for a few laughs if you can spare a couple of minutes.