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Re: How big should bigcore.core be?
- From: Andrew Cagney <cagney at gnu dot org>
- To: Mark Kettenis <kettenis at chello dot nl>
- Cc: gdb at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 18:27:50 -0500
- Subject: Re: How big should bigcore.core be?
- References: <200402192226.i1JMQI07000830@elgar.kettenis.dyndns.org>
Hi Andrew,
How big should the core files generated by bigcore be? A lot smaller
than the amount of memory that bigcore allocates on the heap? Is that
what you mean by "sparse" core files? Is the idea that we disable
this test on platforms that don't generate such "sparse" core dumps?
Yes, you end up with core files like:
$ ls -l bigcore.corefile
-rw------- 1 cagney cagney 3084918784 Feb 19 18:18 bigcore.corefile
$ du -sk bigcore.corefile
280 bigcore.corefile
or:
$ ls -l bigcore.corefile
-rw------- 1 cagney cagney 548673396736 Feb 19 18:24 bigcore.corefile
$ du -sk bigcore.corefile
3544 bigcore.corefile
If the latter is true, I really think we should disable this test by
default and only enable it on systems where we know we won't generate
ridiculously large files running the risk of crashing the machine.
For my work on GDB, I regularly use machines that are not mine, and
I'd really hate it if I crashed those.
It's catch-22. As seen with the assembler tests, unless these are
enabled, everyone ignores them :-(
Andrew