How to enable SIGQUIT core dumps with apport?

Question

I noticed that on a 12.04 system setting ulimit -c unlimited and sending Ctrl+\ does not have the expected result.

Though the shell prints

^\zsh: quit (core dumped)

no core dump is written as far as I can tell.

The file /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern contains an apport pipe - thus, it seems that by default apport is now responsible for writing core dumps.

The directory /var/crash does not contain a recent core dump for my application.

Thus my question: Is apport ignoring SIGQUIT induced core dumps?

If yes:

• Shouldn't that be considered a bug?
• How can I configure apport such that it does not ignore SIGQUIT?

(As a workaround setting /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern to core works as expected, i.e. I get a core dump named core into my CWD after hitting SIGQUIT.)

Answer 1

Yes, apport is ignoring SIGQUIT and yes, it's a bug IMO.

I reported it in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apport/+bug/1153662 with a patch, and a fix has been released.

Answer 2

Apport filters coredumps on SIGQUIT. You'll find a discussion on Launchpad about that issue (dumps core on SIGQUIT). There are good arguments to change this behaviour, but is not clear if Ubuntu will do it.