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On Linux, it is possible to register a core handler via /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern. Doing so invokes the core handler when a process crash. The core_handler uses /proc/<pid>/mem to access the process memory. This way it is not necessary to process the full coredump which takes time and consumes memory. In order to profit from this core handler, for example, one can integrate dump_syms into Yocto and generate an archive with the breakpad symbols of all the binaries in the rootfs. Minidumps are especially useful on embedded systems since they are lightweight and provide contextual information. Change-Id: I9298d81159029cefb81c915831db54884310ad05 Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/breakpad/breakpad/+/2536917 Reviewed-by: Mike Frysinger <vapier@chromium.org>
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How To Use Breakpad As a Coredump Handler on Linux
This document presents a way to use Breakpad in order to generate minidumps system wide on Linux.
Please refer to Linux starter guide if instead you want to integrate breakpad into your application.
Motivation
When working on an embedded system, disk and memory space is often limited and when a process crashes it must be restarted as soon as possible. Sometime saving a full coredump takes to much time or consumes too much space.
Breakpad Core Handler
In such case the program core_handler can be use to generate
minidumps instead of coredumps. core_handler reads the firsts
sections of the coredump (where the various threads are described)
generated by Linux from the standard input and then directly reads
/proc/<pid>/mem to reconstruct the stacktraces.
One can test it with:
# echo "|/usr/libexec/core_handler %P /var/lib/minidump/%e-%i.md" >
/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/core_pipe_limit
Be aware that a real world integration would likely require further
customization and so core_handler can be wrapped into a script (for
example to change the permission of the minidump file or to signal the
presence of the minidump to another service).
Please refer to core(5) for more details.