Bug 54288

Summary:	make systemd-coredump run as user so user has access to coredump
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Marien Zwart <marien.zwart>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	arthur.titeica, egorov_egor, ht990332
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Marien Zwart 2012-08-30 20:31:25 UTC

systemd-189 seems to be installing its coredump hook (/usr/lib/sysctl.d/coredump.conf, running systemd-coredump) by default, but this seems to eat all coredumps with no obvious way to get them back out into a form you can run tools like gdb on. If there is such a way: please point me at it and consider improving the documentation (I looked mainly in "man journalctl", after checking if systemd-coredump has its own manpage, which it somewhat understandably does not). If there is no such thing yet: please consider disabling the coredump hook until one exists, unless there are non-obvious advantages to having coredumps stored in the journal that outweigh the frustration of not finding coredumps anywhere until you remember the existence of the kernel.core_pattern sysctl and turn this integration off.

All this is with systemd-189 (various older versions have the same problem).

Comment 1 Marien Zwart 2012-10-29 17:55:18 UTC

systemd 195's systemd-coredumpctl improves matters considerably, but only for users who can read the journal (that is: root and those in the adm group, normally). It seems unfortunate if you cannot grant a user access to coredumps for their own processes without also allowing them to retrieve everyone else's coredumps. Unless there is a benefit/goal to this that I do not understand I still wish this defaulted to off, or perhaps only affected coredumps of processes managed by systemd (not processes spawned by a logged-in user).

Comment 2 Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek 2013-08-25 02:54:06 UTC

This has been on the TODO list for a long time:

* make the coredump collector tool move itself into the user's cgroup
  so that the coredump is properly written to the user's own journal
  file.

Comment 3 Hussam Al-Tayeb 2014-06-20 23:54:11 UTC

Works for me.
vlc crashed.
I did "/usr/bin/systemd-coredumpctl dump 12747 > coredump" as user. and it output the coredump file which KDE's dolphin identified as a program crash data file.

also running " /usr/bin/systemd-coredumpctl list" prints out the pids + path of the applications I crashed as my own regular user.

Comment 4 Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek 2014-06-21 02:25:09 UTC

As of http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=edc3797f,
journal defaults to SplitMode=uid and coredumps should be readable by
the respective users.

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