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Re: [PATCH v2] [RFC] tracepoint: Add signal coredump tracepoint
- From: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki dot motohiro at jp dot fujitsu dot com>
- To: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat at redhat dot com>
- Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo at elte dot hu>, Andrew Morton <akpm at linux-foundation dot org>, lkml <linux-kernel at vger dot kernel dot org>, systemtap <systemtap at sources dot redhat dot com>, DLE <dle-develop at lists dot sourceforge dot net>, Oleg Nesterov <oleg at redhat dot com>, Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>, Jason Baron <jbaron at redhat dot com>
- Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 16:18:38 +0900
- Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] [RFC] tracepoint: Add signal coredump tracepoint
- References: <4B128ECF.9020906@redhat.com> <20091202204637.25408.41195.stgit@dhcp-100-2-132.bos.redhat.com>
2009/12/3 Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@redhat.com>:
> Add signal coredump tracepoint which shows signal number,
> mm->flags, limits, pointer to file structure and core
> file name.
>
> This tracepoint requirement comes mainly from the viewpoint of
> administrators. Since now we have introduced many coredump
> configurations (e.g. dumpable, coredump_filter, core_pattern,
> etc) and some of them can be modified by users, it will be hard
> to know what was actually dumped (or not dumped) after some
> problem happened on the system. For example, a process didn't
> generated core, coredump doesn't have some sections, etc.
> In those cases, the coredump tracepoint can help us to know
> why the core file is so big or small, or not generated, by
> recording all configurations for all processes on the system.
> That will reduce system-administration cost.
AFAIK, not-dumped case is important than dump successful case.
IOW, admin need to know why the crashed process was not dumped.
This tracepoint doesn't cover all failure case. especially
binfmt->core_dump() et.al.
IOW, this tracepoint seems too specialized piped-coredump feature.
What do you think this tracepoint's use case?