Neil Horman posted an enhancement to a /proc/sys/kernel interface for redirecting core dumps, "allowing the core_pattern to contain arguments to be passed as an argv array to the userspace helper application. It also adds a format specifier, %c, which allows the RLIM_CORE value of the crashing application to be passed on the command line, since RLIMIT_CORE is reduced to zero when execing the userspace helper". Andrew Morton was skeptical at first, "this all seems to be getting a bit nutty. Who needs this feature and what will they do with it, etc?"

Neil pointed to Ubuntu's Apport, "Ubuntu has implemented lots of their functionality with some patches that they never pushed upstream (and IMHO, have some security issues). This is my attempt to do what their doing sanely, so the other distro's (primarily fedora) can take advantage of this technology." Will Woods reiterated, "we're using it for doing a system-wide crash dump handler. Currently Ubuntu's using it with their Apport tool for this purpose; I'm adapting that for Fedora." He went on to explain, "the Ubuntu approach requires a kernel patch that adds a bunch of process information (process pid, RLIMIT_CORE, etc) to the environment of the crash handler. Most of that information can instead be parsed out of the ELF headers - which is what I wrote code to do. The problem that remains is determining the value of RLIMIT_CORE. (This is used to determine whether the user wants a normal corefile, thus retaining normal core dump behavior)."