Empty "core_<nnnn> Directories Getting Created Periodically in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs With No Alert Log or Application Errors (Doc ID 2285409.1)

Last updated on NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Applies to:

Symptoms

Empty directories of the form 'core_<nnnn>' where <nnnn> is an integer representing the dumping process PID were being created periodically every 12 hours in the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory.

There were no corresponding errors in the alert log, nor with any other application or service associated with the database. The database was running on a Redhat Linux x86-64 server.

The system messages log showed that a process known as the ABRT daemon was deleting the core files. The ABRT daemon is responsible for handling the application cores created by segmentation faults.
By default it will reject cores from applications that don't have a known GPG signature. Once this behavior was changed, the core files were not deleted and were available for analysis. The stack showed:

The function getgrnam_r() is an operating system call:

$ man getgrnam_r

NAME
getgrnam, getgrnam_r, getgrgid, getgrgid_r - get group file entry

The core file also showed that the dumping process was called 'oracledelphix_sid'.

Cause

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