Linux – segfaults are not logging into /var/log/messages

linuxsegmentation-fault

I'm using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5. In this whenever a user process crashes due to segmentaion faults, it was not logged in /var/log/messages. Even dmesg is also not showing any messages related to this.

Where as in another distributions (Cent OS 5), I've seen segfaults messages in /var/log/messages whenever my user process crashed.dmesg also showing the segfaults.

Is there any settings that to enabled so that it logs segfaults into /var/log/messages.

I cross checked /etc/syslog.conf of both the systems. Both are same and even /etc/sysconfig/syslog files.

Now I check kernel source code, arch/x86/mm/fault.c, and found print error message of segfault to /var/log/messages only in 2.6.23 and after. Because RHEL5.4 using 2.6.18 kernel, so that it can't log the info into system log.

Best Answer

At least we can set kernel's control kernel.print-fatal-signals to 1 and get quite verbose log reports then:

[1157230.882024] Process m (pid: 1042531, veid: 0, threadinfo ffff8804dac20000, task ffff880667b6f070)
[1157230.882137]
[1157230.882190] Call Trace:
[1157812.633292] hostname.here/1045982: potentially unexpected fatal signal 11.
…
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