Re: [RFC PATCH] piped/ptraced coredump (was: Dump smaller VMAs first in ELF cores)

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2024 at 10:56, Brian Mak <makb@juniper.net> wrote:
>
> Do you mean support truncating VMAs in addition to sorting or as a
> replacement to sorting? If you mean in addition, then I agree, there may
> be some VMAs that are known to not contain information critical to
> debugging, but may aid, and therefore have less priority.

I'd consider it a completely separate issue, so it would be
independent of the sorting.

We have "ulimit -c" to limit core sizes, but I think it might be
interesting to have a separate "limit individual mapping sizes" logic.

We already have that as a concept: vma_dump_size() could easily limit
the vma dump size, but currently only picks "all or nothing", except
for executable mappings that contain actual ELF headers (then it will
dump the first page only).

And honestly, *particularly* if you have a limit on the core size, I
suspect you'd be better off dumping some of all vma's rather than
dumping all of some vma's.

Now, your sorting approach obviously means that large vma's no longer
stop smaller ones from dumping, so it does take care of that part of
it. But I do wonder if we should just in general not dump crazy big
vmas if the dump size has been limited.

             Linus