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Hello,
I am working on ABRT project [1] (Automatic Bug Reporting Tool) and my current task is to teach ABRT to handle crashes of programs in containers [2].
Here's a brief introduction of the project:
ABRT tries to accelerate fixing of fatal application problems (eg. coredumps, uncaught exceptions, kernel oopses), by hooking callbacks into crash handlers [3] and gathering as much as possible information about a program and its current environment at the time of the problem occurrence [4]. Besides the problem detection, ABRT is also capable of immediately notifying an administrator about new problems [5] and provide developers with centralized statistics about problems [6][7].
I am writing to this list because my primary goal is to make ABRT useful on Atomic hosts. I have a pair of ideas and I would be grateful for any feedback you could might be able to give me.
The first idea is to create an image shipping entire ABRT stack and run the image in a super privileged container. I think it is a viable idea but has a big flaw that has been recently revealed. If a host is not able to run a container, then it is not possible to run the ABRT image too, so ABRT image would have a limited support for crashes on Atomic host itself.
The second idea is to put some core bits of ABRT directly to Atomic Host. My plan is to factor out ABRT's core_pattern helper (the thing we put to /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern; man 5 core) that could be installed on Atomic host and create an image shipping the rest of ABRT stack. The footprint of such a design would be barely remarkable, but implementing it would ensure availability of debugging information in all cases.
Thank you for reading and considering my ideas!
Kind regards, Jakub ABRT Team, Red Hat Brno
1: http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ 2: https://github.com/abrt/abrt/wiki/Containers-and-chroots 3: http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/supported_langs.html 4: http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/design.html#elements-collected-by-abrt 5: http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/examples.html#automatic-crash-reporting-through-e-mails 6: https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/summary/ 7: http://faf-report.itos.redhat.com/summary/
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