tree e61e89832c48a3d4430cc7a5c837008c97eb0e8f
parent d3c85bad89b9153df741af14ad859ee49677f00d
author Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com> 1510961205 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1510963800 -0800

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>