Do some distributions use systemd-coredump by default? I not just learned about systemd-coredump and I'm wondering if it could be actually useful for develoment purposes; apport doesn't seem to be.
Several setups of ours rely on that fact, and since we're developing software that is supposed to work on Linux and {Free,Open,Net}BSD, we were happy to be able to reuse a bunch of crash-capture logic.
systemd kneecapped us out of the blue, it took us some time to figure out where the coredumps were going. Now we disable systemd-coredump on all systems. Which works, except when something reenables it or we add a new platform and someone forgets to disable it. Sigh.
Yes, we can deal with it, by disabling it. But crash captures went from being reliable to "did systemd-coredump creep back in?" - a definite regression.
Have you tried masking it? (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemctl.h...)
At least in Debian and Ubuntu systemd-coredump is a separate package (and wasn't installed by default for me atleast), so I expect you can just remove it and it doesn't get automatically enabled in any way.
Sometimes daemons run with a CWD changed somewhere rarely if ever written to at runtime, and presumed to primarily contain information intended for sharing. It's not hard to imagine a security-conscious daemon that's done both chroot() and chdir() into a path intended for publishing information out of, and not generally intended for the daemon to write into except by privileged users/publishers.
When that daemon spuriously dumps core into its CWD now you have potentially sensitive information sitting in the published tree, e.g. maybe the credentials of the privileged users are in that core file.
If they just tried to write to cwd there would be a blogpost about “systemd loses coredumps if your app directory is read-only” which isn’t some theoretical problem, it’s containers.
There was no way to really win here.
That's not actually the issue here. Rather: "it changed so now it's inconsistent across platforms"
> There was no way to really win here.
There is:
- if you're changing a multi-platform standard, include the other platforms (e.g. create a coredumpctl tool for *BSD)
- do the changes slowly/incrementally in a backwards-compatible way (e.g. apply the new coredump locations first to read-only containers and service daemons running as systemd units)
It isn't as if it worked the same everywhere anyway.
- The BSD are irrelevant. Why hamper Linux development to cater for users who don't exist?
coredumps are of course incredibly useful, as they have been for decades. Couldn't live without them.
Is systemd adding any value here other than making things more complex and brittle?
[1]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdOomdNo...
And then, there are very few alternatives, because more and more software requires systemd (and even if most things still don't, so much stuff requires glibc so Alpine or OpenBSD aren't always very good as alternatives).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894469 (2 weeks ago, 134 comments)
I've been running Alpine Linux in production for 4 years now.
Not always. I have sway and pipewire running smooth as can be on my systemd-free workstation. As well as recent releases of Linux, glibc, Mesa, and Firefox. All the essentials are there and up to date for me!
I am using Gentoo with no systemd and with the latest versions of all programs that I am interested in.