It feels like a lot of people have an allergic reaction to core files. (Maybe because they remind you that your program just crashed? Or because they seem to take superhuman understanding to work with?) What's great about them is that they decouple the debugging process from restoring service. In production, when something's broken and you have a hunch will be fine if you restart it, you can save a core file, restart it, restore service, then debug it. In dev and test, when another dev or tester runs into a bug in your area, they can just send you a core file instead of waiting for you to drop everything and debug it right away.
Glad you liked it. Unfortunately, core files can be massive and require you to have a lot of the assets from the environment the fault occurred in to debug. Last but not least, it would be good if they gave us more of a head-start on root cause. These are all things we're directly tackling at Backtrace.
That sounds interesting. I heard about you all through Abel at Surge last month and I'm looking forward to checking that out.
I work primarily on illumos, where we do dump program text, and we're working on getting CTF everywhere. It's almost always possible to debug without the original binaries and usually on different systems as well.
Comments
Great post on the structure of core files.
It feels like a lot of people have an allergic reaction to core files. (Maybe because they remind you that your program just crashed? Or because they seem to take superhuman understanding to work with?) What's great about them is that they decouple the debugging process from restoring service. In production, when something's broken and you have a hunch will be fine if you restart it, you can save a core file, restart it, restore service, then debug it. In dev and test, when another dev or tester runs into a bug in your area, they can just send you a core file instead of waiting for you to drop everything and debug it right away.
Glad you liked it. Unfortunately, core files can be massive and require you to have a lot of the assets from the environment the fault occurred in to debug. Last but not least, it would be good if they gave us more of a head-start on root cause. These are all things we're directly tackling at Backtrace.
That sounds interesting. I heard about you all through Abel at Surge last month and I'm looking forward to checking that out.
I work primarily on illumos, where we do dump program text, and we're working on getting CTF everywhere. It's almost always possible to debug without the original binaries and usually on different systems as well.
Oh, cool! We hope to publish something soon on this. ;-)
It would be great to learn more about the work you're doing.