ESP32 Core Dump¶

Overview¶

ESP-IDF provides support to generate core dumps on unrecoverable software errors. This useful technique allows post-mortem analysis of software state at the moment of failure. Upon the crash system enters panic state, prints some information and halts or reboots depending configuration. User can choose to generate core dump in order to analyse the reason of failure on PC later on. Core dump contains snapshots of all tasks in the system at the moment of failure. Snapshots include tasks control blocks (TCB) and stacks. So it is possible to find out what task, at what instruction (line of code) and what callstack of that task lead to the crash. ESP-IDF provides special script espcoredump.py to help users to retrieve and analyse core dumps. This tool provides two commands for core dumps analysis:

info_corefile - prints crashed task’s registers, callstack, list of available tasks in the system, memory regions and contents of memory stored in core dump (TCBs and stacks)
dbg_corefile - creates core dump ELF file and runs GDB debug session with this file. User can examine memory, variables and tasks states manually. Note that since not all memory is saved in core dump only values of variables allocated on stack will be meaningfull

Configuration¶

There are a number of core dump related configuration options which user can choose in configuration menu of the application (make menuconfig).

Core dump data destination (Components -> ESP32-specific config -> Core dump -> Data destination):

Disable core dump generation
Save core dump to flash
Print core dump to UART

Maximum number of tasks snapshots in core dump (Components -> ESP32-specific config -> Core dump -> Maximum number of tasks).
Delay before core dump is printed to UART (Components -> ESP32-specific config -> Core dump -> Delay before print to UART). Value is in ms.

Save core dump to flash¶

When this option is selected core dumps are saved to special partition on flash. When using default partition table files which are provided with ESP-IDF it automatically allocates necessary space on flash, But if user wants to use its own layout file together with core dump feature it should define separate partition for core dump as it is shown below:

# Name,   Type, SubType, Offset,  Size
# Note: if you change the phy_init or app partition offset, make sure to change the offset in Kconfig.projbuild
nvs,      data, nvs,     0x9000,  0x6000
phy_init, data, phy,     0xf000,  0x1000
factory,  app,  factory, 0x10000, 1M
coredump, data, coredump,,        64K

There are no special requrements for partition name. It can be choosen according to the user application needs, but partition type should be ‘data’ and sub-type should be ‘coredump’. Also when choosing partition size note that core dump data structure introduces constant overhead of 20 bytes and per-task overhead of 12 bytes. This overhead does not include size of TCB and stack for every task. So partirion size should be at least 20 + max tasks number x (12 + TCB size + max task stack size) bytes.

The example of generic command to analyze core dump from flash is: espcoredump.py -p </path/to/serial/port> info_corefile </path/to/program/elf/file> or espcoredump.py -p </path/to/serial/port> dbg_corefile </path/to/program/elf/file>

Print core dump to UART¶

When this option is selected base64-encoded core dumps are printed on UART upon system panic. In this case user should save core dump text body to some file manually and then run the following command: espcoredump.py info_corefile -t b64 -c </path/to/saved/base64/text> </path/to/program/elf/file> or espcoredump.py dbg_corefile -t b64 -c </path/to/saved/base64/text> </path/to/program/elf/file>

Base64-encoded body of core dump will be between the following header and footer:

================= CORE DUMP START =================
<body of base64-encoded core dump, save it to file on disk>
================= CORE DUMP END ===================

The CORE DUMP START and CORE DUMP END lines must not be included in core dump text file.

ROM Functions in Backtraces¶

It is possible situation that at the moment of crash some tasks or/and crashed task itself have one or more ROM functions in their callstacks. Since ROM is not part of the program ELF it will be impossible for GDB to parse such callstacks, because it tries to analyse functions’ prologues to acomplish that. In that case callstack printing will be broken with error message at the first ROM function. To overcome this issue you can use ROM ELF provided by Espressif (https://dl.espressif.com/dl/esp32_rom.elf) and pass it to ‘espcoredump.py’.

Running ‘espcoredump.py’¶

Generic command syntax:

espcoredump.py [options] command [args]

Command Arguments:
Script Options:	–chip,-c {auto,esp32}. Target chip type. Supported values are auto and esp32. –port,-p PORT. Serial port device. –baud,-b BAUD. Serial port baud rate used when flashing/reading.
Commands:	info_corefile. Retrieve core dump and print useful info. dbg_corefile. Retrieve core dump and start GDB session with it.
	–debug,-d DEBUG. Log level (0..3). –gdb,-g GDB. Path to gdb to use for data retrieval. –core,-c CORE. Path to core dump file to use (if skipped core dump will be read from flash). –core-format,-t CORE_FORMAT. Specifies that file passed with “-c” is an ELF (“elf”), dumped raw binary (“raw”) or base64-encoded (“b64”) format. –off,-o OFF. Offset of coredump partition in flash (type make partition_table to see it). –save-core,-s SAVE_CORE. Save core to file. Othwerwise temporary core file will be deleted. Ignored with “-c”. –rom-elf,-r ROM_ELF. Path to ROM ELF file to use (if skipped “esp32_rom.elf” is used). –print-mem,-m Print memory dump. Used only with “info_corefile”.