On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 12:03:33AM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote: > Coredumping currently supports two modes: > > (1) Dumping directly into a file somewhere on the filesystem. > (2) Dumping into a pipe connected to a usermode helper process > spawned as a child of the system_unbound_wq or kthreadd. > > For simplicity I'm mostly ignoring (1). There's probably still some > users of (1) out there but processing coredumps in this way can be > considered adventurous especially in the face of set*id binaries. > > The most common option should be (2) by now. It works by allowing > userspace to put a string into /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern like: > > |/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump %P %u %g %s %t %c %h > > The "|" at the beginning indicates to the kernel that a pipe must be > used. The path following the pipe indicator is a path to a binary that > will be spawned as a usermode helper process. Any additional parameters > pass information about the task that is generating the coredump to the > binary that processes the coredump. > > In the example core_pattern shown above systemd-coredump is spawned as a > usermode helper. There's various conceptual consequences of this > (non-exhaustive list): > > - systemd-coredump is spawned with file descriptor number 0 (stdin) > connected to the read-end of the pipe. All other file descriptors are > closed. That specifically includes 1 (stdout) and 2 (stderr). This has > already caused bugs because userspace assumed that this cannot happen > (Whether or not this is a sane assumption is irrelevant.). > > - systemd-coredump will be spawned as a child of system_unbound_wq. So > it is not a child of any userspace process and specifically not a > child of PID 1. It cannot be waited upon and is in a weird hybrid > upcall which are difficult for userspace to control correctly. > > - systemd-coredump is spawned with full kernel privileges. This > necessitates all kinds of weird privilege dropping excercises in > userspace to make this safe. > > - A new usermode helper has to be spawned for each crashing process. > > This series adds a new mode: > > (3) Dumping into an abstract AF_UNIX socket. s/abstract// Forgot to remove that. Fixed in-tree.
