Static Evergreen hosts (e.g. PPC or zSeries) aren't ephemeral, and config changes made by both our project and others will stick around between tasks.

The "core file pattern" (/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern) is one such config change. This file tells Linux how to dump a process's memory and generate a core file, and can either be an executable to call (e.g. systemd-coredump) or a simple file pattern that will end up in the current directory.

Unfortunately, other tasks that run on these hosts sometimes change the core pattern. When we get a test failure, the core file will thus end up somewhere other than we expect (i.e. the current working directory). It can be manually fixed by running echo 'dump_%e.%p.core' > /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern as root, so we should look into automatically doing this for some tasks.

Two notes: we may not have permissions to touch that file, and it's not a problem on dynamic hosts (e.g. Ubuntu ARM or x86) since those spin up a new machine each time.