Re: Leaving visible breakpoints in memory/core (Was: Breakpoint stepping)

[Phil Muldoon <pmuldoon@redhat.com>]

Roland McGrath wrote:
> This is something that you get for free from the "fancy VM tricks"
> facilities that are still pie in the sky, but is more or less hopeless
> short of that.  So I just wouldn't worry about it any time soon.  The best
> I think we can do for now is just remove the breakpoints when you know it's
> about to dump core.  This is pretty easy (at least in utrace-based
> interfaces) since you just catch the "signal that is about to try to dump
> core" event, which you were probably catching already, and it clearly
> distinguishes "definitely about to die" from "might run a signal handler
> and survive".
>
>   
I'm torn between whether tools like fcore (well only fcore in this 
instance) should just leave things as they are and construct core of the 
process "as is". Depends on the definition of a coredump and whether 
prettying up the process by removing bps, and other blockers is a "good 
thing" before a userland coredump. Or whether we should just dump it, 
warts and all.

The second question speaks to a Frysk mechanics question, if we do 
remove all the bits, then dump core, can we replace them exactly as they 
were before? I'd like to say yes, but I get the nagging feeling this 
isn't so? What do others think?

Phil