Re: [PATCH 0/4] coredump: core dump masking support v3

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Sat Feb 24 2007 - 06:39:41 EST


> Kawai, Hidehiro wrote:
> >This patch series is version 3 of the core dump masking feature,
> >which provides a per-process flag not to dump anonymous shared
> >memory segments.
>
> I just wanted to remind you that you need to be careful about dumping
> the [vdso] segment no matter whether you omit other segments. I didn't
> actually try running your patches, and if the kernel doesn't actually
> consider this segment anonymous and shared, things might already work
> fine as is.
>
> In any case, you can check with "readelf -a", if the [vdso] segment is
> there. And you will find that if you forget to dump it, "gdb" can no
> longer give you stack traces on call chains that involve signal handlers.
>
> As an alternative to your kernel patch, you could achieve the same goal
> in user space, by linking my coredumper
> http://code.google.com/p/google-coredumper/ into your binaries and
> setting up appropriate signal handlers. An equivalent patch for
> selectively omitting memory regions would be trivial to add. While this
> does give you more flexibility, it of course has the drawback of
> requiring you to change your applications, so there still is some
> benefit in a kernelspace solution.

"We are too lazy to change 0.01% of apps that actually need it" is not
good enough reason to push the feature into kernel, I'd say.

--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
-
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/