Re: [cobalt-users] /proc/kcore generating continually?

[flash22@xxxxxxx]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Greg Hewitt-Long wrote:

>  I've just noticed that on our RAQ3, there appears to be a kcore
generating every minute in /proc....
> 
> a couple of questions:
> 
> 1. is this a kernel core dump?
 NO
(fwiw, linux doesn't even support kernel core dumps, it's not an indy ;)
> 2. where do I look to find out what's causing it?
> 3. what are the most likely causes of this?

 /proc is a virtual filesystem that maps between things in the kernel and
the outside world, kcore is a virtual file that represents the memory in
the machine, leave it alone ;)

 > 4. should I be worried?

Nope, it's *supposed* to be there

> 5. it's 201,330,688 bytes big which is running the partitions at:
> 
> /dev/hda1               743466    527432    216034  71% /
> /dev/hda3               198601     17124    181477   9% /var
> /dev/hda4              8597105   7148006   1449099  83% /home

run 'mount' , you will see that /proc is it's own filesystem...

type 'free' note how much free memory you have 'used', note the size of
kcore...(total not including swap)

 /proc is it's own 'magic' filesystem, it doesn't use 'real' disk space
> 
> 
>  Is this likely to grow?  If my guess is right, it's a kernel panic -
 and I'm seeing all memory and kernel activity dumped to the machine every
 minute - so I think I need to worry about this, as it's likely to thrash
the disk to death...

You keep deleting things in /proc and you ARE gonna cause a kernel panic
;)

No, it won't grow....it's not even really there ;)
No, it's not a kernel panic ;)

PS: kernel panics, by definition, do NOT write things to disk , the
machine goes POOF ;)

Unlike windows, unix's generally do NOT trust programs after they have
made booboo's, when the kernel panics (eg causes an exception) the machine
halts and won't usually update the disk with probably bad data..

gsh