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When you look at it, the first thing you will notice is its seemingly gigantic size (as displayed by ls -l), often reaching into the hundreds of terabytes (and much larger than all installed memory devices combined). In fact it's not occupying any disk space at all: as with all other files in /proc, its content is generated on the fly by the kernel whenever the file is read. And it can only be read (writing is neither allowed nor implemented in the kernel), and only with root privileges.Internally it has the format of an ELF core dump file (ELF Type 4/ET_CORE). That means that it has the same format as a core file from a crashed process; but instead of capturing the (static) state of a single process at the moment of the crash, it provides a real time view into the state of the whole system.