Open Source Summit North America 2025

Embedded Linux devices operate in constrained environments with limited storage, bandwidth, and connectivity. Traditional core dumps can be quite large, making it impractical for some of the more constrained embedded systems. Over the past year, we’ve tackled this challenge head-on—optimizing Linux core dumps directly on the device to reduce size, protect privacy, and enable better debugging for IoT developers.

What We’ll Cover:
Inside ELF Core Dumps – A look at the ELF structure and how it applies to core dumps.

On-Device Optimization – How we reduced core dump size by capturing only the first N bytes of each stack, minimizing storage and bandwidth impact.

Privacy-Preserving Debugging – How our custom built (in Rust!) on-device stack unwinder hooks into the core handler, and reduces a coredump to a set of PCs per frame to save space and prevent potential PII from leaking.

Scaling to Millions of Coredumps – Lessons learned from parsing an unprecedented volume of core dumps with Rust.