Home > Linux > Coredump sizes

Coredump sizes

OK, so here’s an interesting one: I’m currently doing the architecture for a new embedded controller running Linux as its OS. It will use a SoftPLC for the actual control of the hardware and I want it to have a proper way of handling OS failures. We’ve looked at the glibc backtrace() functions and they would solve part of the problem.
Our main problem is the fact that the root fs of the controller will be on a read-only cramfs and that the writable flash partition is only limited in size. We will have more memory than flash, meaning that we cannot accomodate full coredumps. Of course, for this the ulimit -c command has been invented, but I wonder what happens if I set the limit to 1Mb for example. If the process image is larger than this, would the coredump not be generated at all? Or would the generated coredump be limited to this size? And if it is limited to a certain size, is there a coredump size you should not dip below risking that the coredump becomes useless due to missing stack information? The online documentation I found was inconclusive, so its on to experimentation. I’ll update this post with my findings…

Bookmark and Share

Related posts:

  1. More information on core-dumps:
Categories: Linux Tags: ,
  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.

Easy AdSense by Unreal