Regarding utrace/gcore/coredumper based application non-disruptive core dumps

Regarding utrace/gcore/coredumper based application non-disruptive core dumps

[Vivek Goyal]

Hi Roland,

I came to know that you were interested in utrace based application
non-disruptive crash dump infrastructure and had some ideas regarding
the same. I am also looking for application non-disruptive dumping
solution and that's what triggered this mail.

A quick googling showed that gcore can already do the job using ptrace()
and probably some /proc/PID/mem infrastcture. Only limitation seems
to be the unability to do multithreaded core dumps.

Google guys seems to have overcome above limitation with coredumper
project.

http://code.google.com/p/google-coredumper/

Now another idea seems to be that use utrace infrastructure and insert
a module, which can stop all the threads of the process and then 
capture the dump.

I was just wondering what's the advantage of possibly using utrace
framework for this? Why not simply enhance the gcore utility or create 
a new user space utility altogether on the lines of google coredumper
to achieve this?

Can you please share your thoughts on this and also elaborate
on what kind of utrace based crash dumping module/functionality/infrastructure
you had in mind?

Thanks
Vivek