Using the infrastructure created in previous patches implement support to
pipe core dumps into programs.
This is done by overloading the existing core_pattern sysctl
with a new syntax:
|program
When the first character of the pattern is a '|' the kernel will instead
threat the rest of the pattern as a command to run. The core dump will be
written to the standard input of that program instead of to a file.
This is useful for having automatic core dump analysis without filling up
disks. The program can do some simple analysis and save only a summary of
the core dump.
The core dump proces will run with the privileges and in the name space of
the process that caused the core dump.
I also increased the core pattern size to 128 bytes so that longer command
lines fit.
Most of the changes comes from allowing core dumps without seeks. They are
fairly straight forward though.
One small incompatibility is that if someone had a core pattern previously
that started with '|' they will get suddenly new behaviour. I think that's
unlikely to be a real problem though.
Additional background:
> Very nice, do you happen to have a program that can accept this kind of
> input for crash dumps? I'm guessing that the embedded people will
> really want this functionality.
I had a cheesy demo/prototype. Basically it wrote the dump to a file again,
ran gdb on it to get a backtrace and wrote the summary to a shared directory.
Then there was a simple CGI script to generate a "top 10" crashes HTML
listing.
Unfortunately this still had the disadvantage to needing full disk space for a
dump except for deleting it afterwards (in fact it was worse because over the
pipe holes didn't work so if you have a holey address map it would require
more space).
Fortunately gdb seems to be happy to handle /proc/pid/fd/xxx input pipes as
cores (at least it worked with zsh's =(cat core) syntax), so it would be
likely possible to do it without temporary space with a simple wrapper that
calls it in the right way. I ran out of time before doing that though.
The demo prototype scripts weren't very good. If there is really interest I
can dig them out (they are currently on a laptop disk on the desk with the
laptop itself being in service), but I would recommend to rewrite them for any
serious application of this and fix the disk space problem.
Also to be really useful it should probably find a way to automatically fetch
the debuginfos (I cheated and just installed them in advance). If nobody else
does it I can probably do the rewrite myself again at some point.
My hope at some point was that desktops would support it in their builtin
crash reporters, but at least the KDE people I talked too seemed to be happy
with their user space only solution.
Alan sayeth:
I don't believe that piping as such as neccessarily the right model, but
the ability to intercept and processes core dumps from user space is asked
for by many enterprise users as well. They want to know about, capture,
analyse and process core dumps, often centrally and in automated form.
[akpm@osdl.org: loff_t != unsigned long]
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
A new member in the ever growing family of call_usermode* functions is
born. The new call_usermodehelper_pipe() function allows to pipe data to
the stdin of the called user mode progam and behaves otherwise like the
normal call_usermodehelp() (except that it always waits for the child to
finish)
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
If ____call_usermodehelper fails, we're not interested in the child
process' exit value, but the real error, so let's stop wait_for_helper from
overwriting it in that case.
Issue discovered by Benedikt Böhm while working on a Linux-VServer usermode
helper.
Signed-off-by: Björn Steinbrink <B.Steinbrink@gmx.de>
Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
I think there is a bug in kmod.c: In __call_usermodehelper(), when
kernel_thread(wait_for_helper, ...) return success, since wait_for_helper()
might call complete() at any time, the sub_info should not be used any
more.
Normally wait_for_helper() take a long time to finish, you may not get
problem for most of the case. But if you remove /sbin/modprobe, it may
become easier for you to get a oop in khelper.
Cc: Matt Helsley <matthltc@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
lockdep needs to have the waitqueue lock initialized for on-stack waitqueues
implicitly initialized by DECLARE_COMPLETION(). Annotate on-stack completions
accordingly.
Has no effect on non-lockdep kernels.
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The attached patch gets rid of a "statement without effect" warning when
CONFIG_KEYS is disabled by making use of the return value of key_get().
The compiler will optimise all of this away when keys are disabled.
Signed-Off-By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The attached patch makes it possible to pass a session keyring through to the
process spawned by call_usermodehelper(). This allows patch 3/3 to pass an
authorisation key through to /sbin/request-key, thus permitting better access
controls when doing just-in-time key creation.
Signed-Off-By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Andi Kleen