Bug 541705

Summary:	No way for a user to control abrt and get coredumps
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	David Nečas <yeti>
Component:	abrt	Assignee:	Jiri Moskovcak <jmoskovc>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	12	CC:	anton, dfediuck, dvlasenk, iprikryl, jan.kratochvil, jmoskovc, kklic, mishu, mitr, mnowak, npajkovs, russo.lutions
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	1.0.6-1.fc12	Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2010-02-09 21:03:02 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description David Nečas 2009-11-26 19:21:58 UTC

Description of problem:
If you are not the system administrator, there's no way to get plain old coredumps (for instance of a program you develop) because you cannot write to /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern and cannot turn off abrt and cannot change its settings.

Even you are the system administrator, it is impossible for some users (`desktop users') to have abrt enabled and for others (`developers') to have it disabled at the same time.

So the only thing that can be done with abrt is to disable it.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
abrt-0.0.11-2.fc12.x86_64

How reproducible:
Always.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log on to a Fedora 12 machine.
2. ulimit -c unlimited
2. Frustrated observe your program crash, being unable to get any info about the crash if you were not lucky to run the program in a debugger.

Comment 1 Denys Vlasenko 2009-12-16 17:40:21 UTC

There is an option in /etc/abrt/plugins/CCpp.conf:
MakeCompatCore = no

Note that it looks like kernel does not respect ulimit setting in this case
(when there is a user-specified coredump handler): even if ulimit -c is 0, the
handler is still called. Worse still, looks like handler has no way to know
that ulimit -c was 0, so it cannot mimic correct behavior.

IOW: with MakeCompatCore = yes, coredump will be created even if ulimit -c is
0, which is quite typical.

That's why the default is "MakeCompatCore = no" and why "MakeCompatCore = yes"
can't be recommended as typical setting. User needs to know what he is doing by
setting it to "yes".

Comment 2 Denys Vlasenko 2009-12-16 17:40:41 UTC

Related bug: 530637

Comment 3 Jiri Moskovcak 2010-02-01 12:10:59 UTC

The option MakeCompatCore has been defaulted to yes in 1.0.5 (should be in the repositories soon), so abrt will honor the "ulimit -c" value and will create the coredump as it used to be without abrt.

Jirka

Comment 4 David Nečas 2010-02-01 12:50:32 UTC

This sounds good.  Does

> abrt will honor the "ulimit -c" value

mean that, despite what comment 1 says, abrt will be able to mimic `ulimit -c' and dump cores only for users that have it enabled?

Comment 5 Denys Vlasenko 2010-02-01 13:08:58 UTC

Yes, it was recently fixed. Now abrt honors "ulimit -c BIGNUM"

And next version will even honor "ulimit -c unlimited" :)
1.0.5 has a bug where unlimited (which is 0xfff..fff) is treated erroneously. It's fixed in git.

Comment 6 Jiri Moskovcak 2010-02-02 13:56:29 UTC

*** Bug 552606 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7 Fedora Update System 2010-02-03 15:17:25 UTC

abrt-1.0.6-1.fc12 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12.
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/abrt-1.0.6-1.fc12

Comment 8 Fedora Update System 2010-02-05 01:31:50 UTC

abrt-1.0.6-1.fc12 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 testing repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
 If you want to test the update, you can install it with 
 su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update abrt'.  You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2010-1470

Comment 9 Fedora Update System 2010-02-09 21:01:54 UTC

abrt-1.0.6-1.fc12 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.