Core Dumps

Terminology

For Unix systems, the term "core dump" generally refers to a dump of the state of an individual process. The term "core dump" is also used in the context of NetWare, but in that context it refers to a dump of the state of a complete system. The equivalent of a NetWare core dump for Unix systems is typically called a "system crash dump" or "kernel crash dump".

Core dump analysis

Core dumps can be a valuable source of information in certain troubleshooting scenarios. Detailed analysis of core dumps requires knowledge of the programming language(s) the problematic application (and the libraries and plugins it depends on) is written in, as well as a development environment that matches the environment in which the core dump was taken in terms of architecture as well as application, library and plugin versions. The supportconfig tool (from the supportutils package) provides a convenient way of capturing this environment information.

As core dump analysis requires specialist skills and can be a highly complex process, it should generally only be attempted when more straightforward troubleshooting steps (in particular, applying relevant patches) have not brought relief.

When do core dumps occur?

A process will crash if it receives a signal (which it is not ignoring, or which it cannot ignore) and for which it has not set up a signal handler routine. For example, most processes generally do not set up a signal handler to handle SIGSEGV and will crash when the kernel sends them this signal to indicate that they have tried to perform an incorrect memory access. When this situation occurs and certain environmental settings are right, the kernel will write a core dump file for the process.

[+] How to obtain application core dumps (SLES12) https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000015982