Forcing a Crash Dump

The next step is to make sure crash dumps are properly configured. First, confirm that dumpadm is configured to save kernel crash dumps and that savecore is enabled. See dumpadm(1M) for more information on crash dump parameters.

# dumpadm
		      Dump content: kernel pages
		       Dump device: /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 (swap)
		Savecore directory: /var/crash/testsystem
		  Savecore enabled: yes

Next, reboot the system using the '-d' flag to reboot(1M), which forces the kernel to panic and save a crash dump.

# reboot -d
Sep 28 17:51:18 testsystem reboot: rebooted by root

panic[cpu0]/thread=70aacde0: forced crash dump initiated at user request

401fbb10 genunix:uadmin+55c (1, 1, 0, 6d700000, 5, 0)
  %l0-7: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
         00000000
...

When the system reboots, make sure the crash dump succeeded:

$ cd /var/crash/testsystem
$ ls
bounds    unix.0    unix.1    vmcore.0  vmcore.1

If the dump is missing from your dump directory, it could be that the partition is out of space. You can free up space and run savecore(1M) manually as root to subsequently save the dump. If your dump directory contains multiple crash dumps, the one you just created will be the unix.[n] and vmcore.[n] pair with the most recent modification time.