Re: utrace vs. ptrace

Linus Torvalds
2006-07-13T19:06:13Z

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Andi Kleen wrote:

>
> > > I'm not sure that's particularly useful (I think I would prefer to
> > > keep it in kernel), [...]
> >
> > why would we want to keep this in the kernel? Coredumping in the kernel
> > is fragile, and it's nowhere near performance-critical to really live
> > within the kernel.
>
> Mostly because I fear it would become another udev like disaster, requiring user
> space updates regularly, and core dumps are a fairly critical debugging feature
> that I wouldn't like to become unreliable.

Doing core-dumping in user space would be insane. It doesn't give _any_
advantages, only disadvantages.

Why do people keep thinking that doing things in user space is "safer" and
"easier". It's quite often not. For example, all the "fragile" stuff would
be true for a user-space dumper (don't tell me it's safer - it would
obviously have to run with elevated capabilities), and a lot of it would
be a hell of a lot harder.

Linus