What is ABRT
ABRT is the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool which runs silently in the background most of the time and springs into action when an application crashes or a kernel oops is detected and reports it to the user. ABRT consists of a daemon, abrtd, which runs silently in the background most of the time. It springs into action when an application crashes, or a kernel oops is detected. The daemon then collects the relevant problem data such as a core file if there is one, the crashing application’s command line parameters, and other data of forensic utility.
ABRT is a new feature that is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and above versions.
What is the impact of disabling the ABRT service ?
The user would not be reported of any crashes happening on the system and would need to monitor the system and /var/log/messages constantly for any crashes happening. User should consider disabling the service only if ABRT service is of low importance in your environment and have an alternate problem detecting tool monitoring the system.
How we can avoid writing the core at all ?
ABRT would detect crashes in applications written in the C/C++ and Python languages, as well as kernel oopses. It will collect the problem data which would include the coredump by default, in case of application crashes. Hence, the core would be dumped in the DumpLocation i.e by default /var/spool/abrt.
If /var is getting filled, you may consider setting another location in /etc/abrt/abrt.conf.
# Specify where you want to store coredumps and all files which are needed for # reporting. (default:/var/spool/abrt) # # Changing dump location could cause problems with SELinux. See man abrt_selinux(8). # DumpLocation = [absolute path of dump folder]
Stopping the abrtd service safely in RHEL 5,6
# service abrtd stop # service abrt-ccpp stop # service abrt-oops stop
Stopping the abrtd service safely in RHEL 7
# systemctl stop abrtd # systemctl stop abrt-ccpp
Disabling the abrtd permanently in RHEL 5,6
To disable abrtd permanently such that it does not start up automatically even after reboot, follow the commands given below:
# chkconfig abrtd off # chkconfig abrt-ccpp off # chkconfig abrt-oops off
Disabling the abrtd permanently in RHEL 7
To disable abrtd permanently such that it does not start up automatically even after reboot, follow the commands given below:
# systemctl disable abrtd # systemctl disable abrt-ccpp