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

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 11:18:01 +0200
Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de> 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?