coredump: add tracepoint for coredump events
Coredump is a generally useful and interesting event in the lifetime
of a process. Add a tracepoint so it can be monitored through the
standard kernel tracing infrastructure.
BPF-based crash monitoring is an advanced approach that
allows real-time crash interception: by attaching a BPF program at
this point, tools can use bpf_get_stack() with BPF_F_USER_STACK to
capture the user-space stack trace at the exact moment of the crash,
before the process is fully terminated, without waiting for a
coredump file to be written and parsed.
However, there is currently no stable kernel API for this use case.
Existing tools rely on attaching fentry probes to do_coredump(),
which is an internal function whose signature changes across kernel
versions, breaking these tools.
Add a stable tracepoint that fires at the beginning of
do_coredump(), providing BPF programs a reliable attachment point.
At tracepoint time, the crashing process context is still live, so
BPF programs can call bpf_get_stack() with BPF_F_USER_STACK to
extract the user-space backtrace.
The tracepoint records:
- sig: signal number that triggered the coredump
- comm: process name
Example output:
$ echo 1 > /sys/kernel/tracing/events/coredump/coredump/enable
$ sleep 999 &
$ kill -SEGV $!
$ cat /sys/kernel/tracing/trace
# TASK-PID CPU# ||||| TIMESTAMP FUNCTION
# | | | ||||| | |
sleep-634 [036] ..... 145.222206: coredump: sig=11 comm=sleep
Suggested-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Breno Leitao <leitao@debian.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260323-coredump_tracepoint-v2-1-afced083b38d@debian.org
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>