Re: [PATCH] coredump: Limit what can interrupt coredumps

From: Tony Battersby
Date: Thu Aug 12 2021 - 10:13:21 EST


On 8/11/21 9:55 PM, Jens Axboe wrote:
>
> That is very interesting. Like Olivier mentioned, it's not that actual
> commit, but rather the change of behavior implemented by it. Before that
> commit, we'd hit the async workers more often, whereas after we do the
> correct retry method where it's driven by the wakeup when the page is
> unlocked. This is purely speculation, but perhaps the fact that the
> process changes state potentially mid dump is why the dump ends up being
> truncated?
>
> I'd love to dive into this and try and figure it out. Absent a test
> case, at least the above gives me an idea of what to try out. I'll see
> if it makes it easier for me to create a case that does result in a
> truncated core dump.
>
If it helps, a "good" coredump from my program is about 350 MB
compressed down to about 7 MB by bzip2.  A truncated coredump varies in
size from about 60 KB to about 2 MB before compression.  The program
that receives the coredump uses bzip2 to compress the data before
writing it to disk.

Tony