What's New in Managing System Crash Information

This section describes new or changed features for managing system resources in this Oracle Solaris release.

Fast Crash Dump Facility

This feature enhancement enables the system to save crash dumps in less time, using less space. The time that is required for a crash dump to complete is now 2 to 10 times faster, depending on the platform. The amount of disk space that is required to save crash dumps in the savecore directory is reduced by the same factors. To accelerate the creation and compression of the crash dump file, the fast crash dump facility utilizes lightly used CPUs on large systems. A new crash dump file, vmdump.n, is a compressed version of the vmcore.n and unix.n files. Compressed crash dumps can be moved over the network more quickly and then analyzed off-site. Note that the dump file must first be uncompressed to use it with tools like the mdb utility. You can uncompress a dump file by using the savecore command, either locally or remotely.

To support the new crash dump facility, the -z option has been added to the dumpadm command. Use this option to specify whether to save dumps in a compressed or an uncompressed format. The default format is compressed.

For more detailed information, see the dumpadm(1M) and the savecore(1M) man pages.