Re: [PATCH] [3/3] Support piping into commands in/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Aug 16 2006 - 14:08:01 EST


On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 11:18:01 +0200
Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxx> wrote:

> > Very nice, do you happen to have a program that can accept this kind of
> > input for crash dumps? I'm guessing that the embedded people will
> > really want this functionality.
>
> I had a cheesy demo/prototype. Basically it wrote the dump to a file again,
> ran gdb on it to get a backtrace and wrote the summary to a shared directory.
> Then there was a simple CGI script to generate a "top 10" crashes
> HTML listing.
>
> Unfortunately this still had the disadvantage to needing full disk space
> for a dump except for deleting it afterwards (in fact it was worse because
> over the pipe holes didn't work so if you have a holey address map it would
> require more space).
>
> Fortunately gdb seems to be happy to handle /proc/pid/fd/xxx input pipes
> as cores (at least it worked with zsh's =(cat core) syntax), so it would be
> likely possible to do it without temporary space with a simple wrapper that
> calls it in the right way. I ran out of time before doing that though.
>
> The demo prototype scripts weren't very good. If there is really interest
> I can dig them out (they are currently on a laptop disk on the desk
> with the laptop itself being in service), but I would recommend to
> rewrite them for any serious application of this and fix the disk space problem.
>
> Also to be really useful it should probably find a way to automatically
> fetch the debuginfos (I cheated and just installed them in advance)
>
> If nobody else does it I can probably do the rewrite myself again at some point.
>
> My hope at some point was that desktops would support it in their
> builtin crash reporters, but at least the KDE people I talked
> too seemed to be happy with their user space only solution.

It doens't sounds like there's particularly strong userspace "pull" for
this feature?
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/