How big should bigcore.core be?

[Andrew Cagney]

> Hi Andrew,
> 
> How big should the core files generated by bigcore be?  A lot smaller
> than the amount of memory that bigcore allocates on the heap?  Is that
> what you mean by "sparse" core files?  Is the idea that we disable
> this test on platforms that don't generate such "sparse" core dumps?

Yes, you end up with core files like:

$ ls -l bigcore.corefile
-rw-------    1 cagney   cagney   3084918784 Feb 19 18:18 bigcore.corefile
$ du -sk bigcore.corefile
280     bigcore.corefile

or:

$ ls -l bigcore.corefile
-rw-------    1 cagney   cagney   548673396736 Feb 19 18:24 bigcore.corefile
$ du -sk bigcore.corefile
3544    bigcore.corefile

> If the latter is true, I really think we should disable this test by
> default and only enable it on systems where we know we won't generate
> ridiculously large files running the risk of crashing the machine.
> For my work on GDB, I regularly use machines that are not mine, and
> I'd really hate it if I crashed those.

It's catch-22.  As seen with the assembler tests, unless these are 
enabled, everyone ignores them :-(

Andrew