[systemd-devel] is the watchdog useful?

[Umut Tezduyar Lindskog]

I am curious Zbigniew of how you find out if the coredump was on a starved
process?

This is common for our embedded devices. I didn't think it is common for
desktop too.

It is really useful for getting coredumps on deadlocked applications. For
that reason I don't think it is good to remove this functionality
completely.

Umut

On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 7:51 PM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <
zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:

> In principle, the watchdog for services is nice. But in practice it seems
> be bring only grief. The Fedora bugtracker is full of automated reports of
> ABRTs,
> and of those that were fired by the watchdog, pretty much 100% are bogus,
> in
> the sense that the machine was resource starved and the watchdog fired.
>
> There a few downsides to the watchdog killing the service:
> 1. if it is something like logind, it is possible that it will cause
> user-visible
> failure of other services
> 2. restarting of the service causes additional load on the machine
> 3. coredump handling causes additional load on the machine, quite
> significant
> 4. those failures are reported in bugtrackers and waste everyone's time.
>
> I had the following ideas:
> 1. disable coredumps for watchdog abrts: systemd could set some flag
> on the unit or otherwise notify systemd-coredump about this, and it could
> just
> log the occurence but not dump the core file.
> 2. generally disable watchdogs and make them opt in. We have
> 'systemd-analyze service-watchdogs',
> and we could make the default configurable to "yes|no".
>
> What do you think?
> Zbyszek
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