linux-kernel.vger.kernel.org archive mirror
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Kip Macy <kmacy@netapp.com>, Elan Feingold <efeingold@mn.rr.com>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Multithreaded core dumps
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 05:03:59 -0400 (EDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0108300457270.9879-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <E15cN7L-0000gX-00@the-village.bc.nu>



On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> > I am inclined to believe that that is the case. Unfortunately, I have no
> > advice to give - but I am writing because I think that it would be neat if
> > you have the time and the inclination for you to document your findings as
> > you progress and put them on the web. 
> 
> The 2.4-ac tree supports dumping core.$pid for the threads that actually
> died

... and these dumps are not reliable.  Living thread may modify the
contents of dump as it's being written out.  I.e. you are getting
false alarms - inconsistent data that was never there.

Think of a linked list protected by a mutex.  Half of its entries are
already written out.  Surviving thread removes an element.  It updates
the in-core structures correctly.  The problem being, in the dump
we get part of memory from before that change and part - after.  If
you notice that when you are looking at the dump - welcome to a nice
chase after the bug that never existed.


  reply	other threads:[~2001-08-30  9:04 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2001-08-30  5:21 Multithreaded core dumps Elan Feingold
2001-08-30  5:50 ` Kip Macy
2001-08-30  8:24   ` Alan Cox
2001-08-30  9:03     ` Alexander Viro [this message]
2001-08-30  9:12       ` Alan Cox
2001-08-30 10:08         ` Alexander Viro
2001-08-30  9:33       ` David S. Miller
2001-08-30  8:16 ` Multithreaded core dumps (CLONE_THREAD and elf) Terje Eggestad
2001-08-30  9:19   ` Andreas Dilger

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=Pine.GSO.4.21.0108300457270.9879-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu \
    --to=viro@math.psu.edu \
    --cc=alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk \
    --cc=efeingold@mn.rr.com \
    --cc=kmacy@netapp.com \
    --cc=linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).