RFR(S): 8074354: tests that intentionally crash the VM can timeout creating a core file

[Thomas Stüfe]

Hi Staffan,

As in Staffan L's comments, we need to have a discuss and make final
> decision for it --- tradeoff.
>
>
> Given that core files on other platforms are useful even after we write
> the hotspot error logs, it would probably make sense to have the same
> mechanism on all platforms as Thomas points out. I haven’t been debugging
> many windows failures lately so perhaps someone who does can chime in here?
>
> Personally I prefer a full dump when VM crashes on Windows, which is more
> helpful. I found minidump not very helpful in most of the cases.
>
>
> Windows calls all crash dumps “minidumps”. They can however be configured
> to include more or less information, but even with all the information it
> is still called a “minidump” (or at least the API for creating them is
> called that).
>
>
Sorry, my sentence was garbled and not very clear.

I was referring to the MINIDUMP_TYPE parameter on MiniDumpWriteDump(): in
our code base, we used to have a switch to write either full minidumps
(with MiniDumpWithFullMemory set) or partial minidumps without full memory
info, just the thread stacks. Trade off was minidump size: full memory info
made for very large dumps, the partial ones were small.

In practice we found the full dumps often too large and unwieldy, and the
partial ones were often useless. So in the end we came to rely on the error
logs and put lots of work into improving those.

Thomas



> /Staffan
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