core dump
- noun
- /kɔr dʌmp/
- Specialized
- To troubleshoot the software issue, the developers reviewed the core dump generated during the application's failure.
Examples
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While native programs can leverage operating-system support for core dumps, dynamic languages must present postmortem state using the same higher-level abstractions with which their developers are familiar.
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After the program crashed, the engineers analyzed the core dump to identify the source of the error.
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Examining the core dump is also the only way to be sure the problem you found is the same one the bug reporter encountered.
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On most systems, it is possible to generate a core dump from running processes too, which makes core-dump analysis attractive during development as well.
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On most systems, it is possible to generate a core dump from running processes too, which makes core-dump analysis attractive during development as well.
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Such facilities are only a start, however: setting up an application to trigger a core dump on crash in the first place is nontrivial.
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As an example, let's look at core dumps under Illumos, an open-source Solaris-based system.
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Therefore, to support postmortem debugging, the interpreter would need to trigger the core-dump facility explicitly, not rely on the operating system to detect the crash.
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For example, the Oracle Java HotSpot VM supports extracting Java-level state from JVM native core dumps.
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Likewise, these systems can be configured so that when a user application crashes, the operating system saves a core dump of all program state to a file and then restarts the application. In most cases, these mechanisms allow the operating system or user application to return to service quickly while preserving enough information to root-cause the failure later.
Academic text (2011)
Synonyms
A copy of computer memory or data used to find errors
Surface Forms
Morphology
While 'core' can mean the central part and 'dump' can mean a deposition of material, the specific computing sense — a file recording a program's memory after a crash for debugging — is a technical, domain-specific meaning. An average B1 learner who knows the basic senses of 'core' and 'dump' would not reliably derive this specialized file/debugging meaning without exposure, so the expression is not transparently compositional.
Etymology
The noun core dump may come from early computers that stored memory in tiny rings called core. After a crash the computer would dump those rings into a file to 'copy' or 'empty' the memory so engineers could see what went wrong, and today core dump means the file with a computer's memory contents.