Is it possible to peridocally save state of the program through a core dump?

Question

I just want to dump core without stopping the program. This would be essentialy serializing a whole state of the program. A very convenient thing for debugging later.

Is it possible under linux?

This is actually a duplicate, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/131439/how-can-a-c-program-produce-a-core-dump-of-itself-without-terminating — Artelius, Oct 07 '09 at 11:42

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 07 '09 at 12:40

6

I found simple solution:

$gcore
usage:  gcore [-o filename] pid

It is distributed with gdb.

answered Oct 07 '09 at 12:40

Łukasz Lew

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That looks like the kind of program I've wanted for years! Much more reliable than kill -11 :-) Thanks Łukasz! – Arthur Reutenauer Oct 07 '09 at 12:45

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '09 at 11:19

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I don't think this is exactly what you want (unless you want to pause the program while inspecting, or even modify the memory), but have a look at CryoPID.

answered Oct 07 '09 at 11:19

Artelius

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 07 '09 at 14:22

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Even better!!! Gdb 7.0 have support for reversible debugging. And it was released yesterday, what a coincidence :D

answered Oct 07 '09 at 14:22

Łukasz Lew

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 07 '09 at 11:21

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should be doable, at least /proc//smaps contains information of the process memory and the actual memory should be accessible via /dev/mem

I think you need to suspend the process to avoid corruption of the captured info, though.

answered Oct 07 '09 at 11:21

Kimvais

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Is it possible to peridocally save state of the program through a core dump?

4 Answers4