Ok this has changed recently. It is part of a new mechanism for detecting recursive core-dump, ie. dumps in the core dump handler. This changed in the commit below:
commit 725eae32df7754044809973034429a47e6035158 Author: Neil Horman <[email protected]> Date: Wed Sep 23 15:56:54 2009 -0700 exec: make do_coredump() more resilient to recursive crashes Change how we detect recursive dumps. Currently we have a mechanism by which we try to compare pathnames of the crashing process to the core_pattern path. This is broken for a dozen reasons, and just doesn't work in any sort of robust way. I'm replacing it with the use of a 0 RLIMIT_CORE value. Since helper apps set RLIMIT_CORE to zero, we don't write out core files for any process with that particular limit set. It the core_pattern is a pipe, any non-zero limit is translated to RLIM_INFINITY. This allows complete dumps to be captured, but prevents infinite recursion in the event that the core_pattern process itself crashes. [[email protected]: coding-style fixes] Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <[email protected]> Reported-by: Earl Chew <[email protected]> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]> Cc: Andi Kleen <[email protected]> Cc: Alan Cox <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> The practicle upshot of which seems to be that setting the limit to 0 stops coredumps even for pipes. However, setting it to a very low value, say 1, will restore the original behaviour without allowing a real dump to occur where pipes are not in use. -- [lucid] breaks apport: core dumps get aborted even if core_pattern is a pipe https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/498525 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
