Abnormal End of Processes

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Wed Apr 18 17:27:51 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 18 April 2007 12:47, James Antill wrote:
>  Does this deal with the case where the application catches SIGSEGV, and
> then calls abort() (or just raises SIGABRT).

>From this hook, no. It just doesn't have the visibility for that.

>  Also in a more general way, I'm pretty sure you'd also want to know
> whenever abort()/raise(SIGABORT) is done, at least all the times I've
> seen those calls it's the same thing as a SIGSEGV situation from the
> applications POV.

Not really, there are a surprising number of apps that consider abort() to be 
a normal way of exiting when there's a minor problem. I've never seen any app 
catch SIGSEGV and then raise(sigabort).

>  The only thing I can think against this is that _very rarely_ a
> sysadmin will do a "kill -ABRT" to stop a problem application ... which
> I assume is why you've filtered it?

No, its because you get a lot of programs ending with abort - hald-addon-acpi 
and dhcdbd to name a couple.

> But even then is a "spurious" audit event that bad?

It was frequent enough I didn't want that noise in the logs at this point. If 
those applications get cleaned up, I think we could allow abort() to go 
through.

-Steve




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