Re: mmap'ed memory in core files ?

[Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 08:16:11PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk wrote:
> On 7/1/08, Philippe De Muyter <phdm@macqel.be> wrote:
> > Hello everybody,
> >
> >  I develop video acquisition software using the video1394 interface.
> >  The images grabbed by the camera and iee1394 bus are kept in kernel
> >  memory and made available to the user program through a mmap call done
> >  in the libdc1394 library :
> >
> >  dma_ring_buffer= mmap(0, vmmap.nb_buffers * vmmap.buf_size,
> >                 PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,MAP_SHARED, craw->capture.dma_fd, 0);
> >
> >  Sometimes, my program crashes and produces a core file :)  It seems to
> >  me that the core file does not contain the mmap'ed memory and hence
> >  I cannot replay my program with the same image for debugging purpose.
> >
> >  Is it possible to configure the kernel through /proc, or through the mmap
> >  system call to have that mmapped segment in the core file, or do I need
> >  to modify the kernel itself to obtain the behaviour I want ?  If I
> >  need to modify the kernel, can some kind soul provide me some pointers ?
> 
> 
> Have a look at the section "Controlling which mappings are written to
> the core dump" in a recent core.5 man page:
> http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man5/core.5.html

Interesting (and somewhat off topic to your conversation here) - it
appears that when dumping mappings, the kernel ignores the maximum
core size set with "limit".

This is particularly interesting on a 64 bit kernel where a bug in
your code causes you to try to read something about 2Gb into your
alleged mmaped file (actual size ~500 bytes) and the segfault causes
a coredump.

Bron.