Memory dump blog recovery

firefox, ram memory, memory, dump, recovery, /proc/kcore, kcore

1^st of November 2006

My Firefox froze in one of the tabs when in another tab I had a long Fry-IT intranet blog half finished. To avoid having to rewrite the whole text again Jan showed me how to dump the RAM memory onto disk which I could then look through with standard tools. For this to work you have plenty of diskspace since the dump file is about 1Gb big:

 $ sudo su -
 # df -h
 # cat /proc/kcore > /usr/kcore.dump
 # strings /usr/kcore.dump > /usr/kcore.strings
 # ls -lh | grep kcore
 -rw-r--r--   1 root    root    1016M 2006-10-30 10:18 kcore.dump
 -rw-r--r--   1 root    root      74M 2006-10-30 10:19 kcore.strings
 # less kcore.strings | grep 'Bla bla bla'

Was this the most boring blog item I've written in a long time? Maybe, but it's good to have it noted the next time Firefox crashes.

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