Including contigmem in core dumps

I've been wondering why we exclude memory allocated by eal_get_virtual_area() from core dumps? (More specifically, it calls eal_mem_set_dump() to call madvise() to disable core dumps from the allocated region.)

On many occasions, when debugging after a crash, it would have been very convenient to be able to see the contents of an mbuf or other object allocated in contigmem space. And we often avoid using the rte memory allocator just because of this.

Is there any reason for this, or could it perhaps be a compile-time configuration option not to call madvise()?

Hi Lewis,

2024-05-27 19:34 (UTC-0500), Lewis Donzis:

Memory reserved by eal_get_virtual_area() is not yet useful, but it is very large, so by excluding it from dumps, DPDK prevents dumps from including large zero-filled parts.

It also makes sense to call eal_mem_set_dump(..., false) from eal_memalloc.c:free_seg(), because of --huge-unlink=never:
in this mode (Linux-only), freed segments are not cleared, so if they were included into dump, it would be a lot of garbage data.

Newly allocated hugepages are not included into dumps because this would make dumps very large by default. However, this could be an opt-in as a runtime option if need be.

Thanks for the clarification. I agree that not including freed segments makes perfect sense.

But when debugging a core dump, it's sometimes really helpful to be able to see what's in the mbuf that was being processed at the time. Perhaps it would be a useful option to be able to tell the allocator not to disable core dumps.

In the mean time, my experiments to get around this have not been fruitful.

I wondered if we could enable core dumps for mbufs by calling rte_mempool_mem_iter() on the pool returned by rte_pktmbuf_pool_create(), and have the callback function call madvise(memhdr->addr, memhdr->len, MADV_CORE). But that didn't help, or at least the size of the core file didn't increase.

I then tried disabling the call to madvise() in the DPDK source code, and that didn't make any difference either.

Note that this is on FreeBSD, so I wonder if there's some fundamental reason that the contigmem memory doesn't get included in a core dump?