A dump device is usually disk space that is reserved to store system crash dump information. When a system is installed, a ZFS swap volume and dump volume are created automatically. You can change a system's dump volume by using the dumpadm command. For more information, see Troubleshooting System Administration Issues in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .
In a ZFS root environment, swap and dump are configured as separate ZFS volumes. The advantages to this model are as follows:
You don't have to partition a disk to include swap and dump areas.
Swap and dump devices benefit from the underlying ZFS I/O pipeline architecture.
You can set characteristics, such as compression, on swap and dump devices.
You can reset both swap and dump device sizes. For example:
# zfs set volsize=2G rpool/dump # zfs get volsize rpool/dump NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/dump volsize 2G -
Keep in mind that reallocating a large dump device is a time-consuming process.
On an active system, you might consider adding a second swap volume to increase overall swap size.
For more information about using ZFS swap and dump devices, see Managing Your ZFS Swap and Dump Devices in Managing ZFS File Systems in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .