Diagnosing a Crash

Work from evidence. The goal is an honest account of what happened, not a plausible-sounding story.

Establish the facts

coredumpctl info <pid> is the starting point. Beyond the backtrace, note the command line the process was started with — it usually reveals what the program was working on when it died, which is often the whole answer.

coredumpctl list shows whether this crash is a one-off or a pattern. Repeated crashes of the same program, or several programs dying together, point somewhere different than a single failure does.

Rule out the boring causes first

Check resource exhaustion before blaming the program: free -h, and the journal for OOM kills. A process killed by the OOM killer is not a bug in that process.