Hi,
Is there any way to find using kernel data structure, the VMA of a process belongs to
stack or heap. It is easy to distinguish the VMA belongs to code segment or not from
vm_area_struct structure, using "vm_flags" variable.
In "elf_core_dump()" function I'm planning to dump only code and data
segments.
Can any body please guide me...
--Regards,
rajesh
On Wed, 05 Sep 2007 Dave Anderson wrote :
Rajesh wrote:
>Dave,
>
>Thanks for your explanation.
>
>Well the reason behind my questions is, we have an application running on customer
site and the application consumes around 60GB of system memory.
>When this process receives the segmentation fault or signal abort, the kernel will
start to take the process core dump. Here is the problem. Kernel takes at least 1hr
(60-minutes) to come out from core dump. During this time the system is unresponsive
(hung), and I feel it is because the system is entering into thrashing due to huge memory
usage by the process. This long down time is not acceptable by the customer.
>
>So I started to find the better way or tackling the problem.
>
>1>First thing we thought is changing the system page size from 4KB to 8KB. Since
this change could not be done on our x86_64 architecture, since x86_64 architecture
doesnt support multi-page size option.
>
>2>We wrote a program using libbfd APIs and used with in our application. Whenever
the SIGSEGV or SIGABRT is received by the process it will log the stack trace of all the
threads within that process. This feature is not so effective or flexible as compared to
process core dump.
>
>3>Last we thought of using kcore/vmcore to analyze the cause for SIGSEGV or
SIGABRT.
>
>4>I have one more thought, making the elf_core_dump() function SMP. This function
is responsible for dumping the core, and the function is present in
/usr/src/linux/fs/binfmt_elf.c
>
>
>Any comments/ideas are welcome.
>
>--Regards,
>rajesh
Maybe tinker with maydump()?
If you know that the core dump contains the VMA's that are
not necessary to dump, such as large shared memory segments,
and you can identify them from the VMA, you can prevent
them from being copied to the core dump. There's this
patch floating around, which may have been updated:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/2/16/149
Dave