Alasdair on Everything

Making Solaris SMF ignore core dumps in child processes

January 19th, 2010

I can never ever remember how to do this and googling for it always takes ages, so I thought I’d jot it down here.

When Solaris SMF starts a process, it tracks that process and all its children. If any of those children coredump, SMF treats it as a failure and puts the state into maintenance mode. Not terribly useful if you’re launching buggy software like FFMpeg.

The solution? Simple! Slap this in your SMF Manifest under the exec stop method:

        <property_group name='startd' type='framework'>
                 <!-- sub-process core dumps shouldn't restart
                         session -->
                 <propval name='ignore_error' type='astring'
                         value='core,signal' />
        </property_group>

Entry Filed under: Solaris