proc, coredump: add CoreDumping flag to /proc/pid/status
authorRoman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Fri, 17 Nov 2017 23:26:45 +0000 (15:26 -0800)
committerJaehoon Chung <jh80.chung@samsung.com>
Tue, 29 Jan 2019 02:25:35 +0000 (11:25 +0900)
commit427a07fde311274dde6c65f3eb110c4cabfe8c39
treebc18401e86d18ab4cd95eaeec8b73c87f7fcf486
parent1663da8e54e7d89f897da8db4cc7abfdc9c7789e
proc, coredump: add CoreDumping flag to /proc/pid/status

Right now there is no convenient way to check if a process is being
coredumped at the moment.

It might be necessary to recognize such state to prevent killing the
process and getting a broken coredump.  Writing a large core might take
significant time, and the process is unresponsive during it, so it might
be killed by timeout, if another process is monitoring and
killing/restarting hanging tasks.

We're getting a significant number of corrupted coredump files on
machines in our fleet, just because processes are being killed by
timeout in the middle of the core writing process.

We do have a process health check, and some agent is responsible for
restarting processes which are not responding for health check requests.
Writing a large coredump to the disk can easily exceed the reasonable
timeout (especially on an overloaded machine).

This flag will allow the agent to distinguish processes which are being
coredumped, extend the timeout for them, and let them produce a full
coredump file.

To provide an ability to detect if a process is in the state of being
coredumped, we can expose a boolean CoreDumping flag in
/proc/pid/status.

Example:
$ cat core.sh
  #!/bin/sh

  echo "|/usr/bin/sleep 10" > /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
  sleep 1000 &
  PID=$!

  cat /proc/$PID/status | grep CoreDumping
  kill -ABRT $PID
  sleep 1
  cat /proc/$PID/status | grep CoreDumping

$ ./core.sh
  CoreDumping: 0
  CoreDumping: 1

[guro@fb.com: document CoreDumping flag in /proc/<pid>/status]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170928135357.GA8470@castle.DHCP.thefacebook.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170920230634.31572-1-guro@fb.com
Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
[inki.dae: backported from mainline - commit : c643401218be
  On Tizen, there is one issue that a process doing coredump can be killed.
  This patch allows a process to detect if given process is being dumped.
  With this, Tizen can exclude such process from 'kill list' so that
  coredump process can finish coredump work.]
Signed-off-by: Inki Dae <inki.dae@samsung.com>
Change-Id: I4f21bdcbbf1451f04e2083621925953823bd1164
Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
fs/proc/array.c