systemd Developer Lennart Poettering lennart@poettering.net systemd-coredump 8 systemd-coredump Log and store core dumps /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump systemd-coredump can be used as a helper binary by the kernel when a user space program receives a fatal signal and dumps core. For it to be used in this capacity, it must be specified by the kernel.core_pattern sysctl8 setting. Systemd installs /usr/lib/sysctl.d/50-coredump.conf which configures kernel.core_pattern to invoke systemd-coredump. This file may be masked or overriden to use a different setting following normal sysctl.d5 rules. The behaviour of a specific program upon reception of a signal is governed by a few factors which are described in detail in core5. In particular, the coredump will only be processed when the related resource limits are high enough. For programs started by systemd those may be set using LimitCore= (see systemd.exec5). systemd-coredump will log the coredump including a backtrace if possible, and store the core (contents of process' memory contents) in an external file on disk in /var/lib/systemd/coredump, or directly in the journal. This behaviour may be modified using coredump.conf5. Apart from the journalctl1 log viewer, coredumpctl1 may be used to list and extract coredumps. coredump.conf5, coredumpctl1, systemd-journald.service8, core5, sysctl.d5, systemd-sysctl.service8.