This section describes how to manage system crash information in the Solaris environment.
This section describes how to manage system crash dump information in the Solaris environment.
The new dumpadm command, which allows system administrators to configure crash dumps of the operating system. The dumpadm configuration parameters include the dump content, dump device, and the directory in which crash dump files are saved. See "The dumpadm Command" for more information about the dumpadm command.
Dump data is now stored in compressed format on the dump device. Kernel crash dump images can be as big as 4 Gbytes or more. Compressing the data means faster dumping and less disk space needed for the dump device.
Saving crash dump files is run in the background when a dedicated dump device--not the swap area--is part of the dump configuration. This means a booting system does not wait for the savecore command to complete before going to the next step. On large memory systems, the system can be available before savecore completes.
System crash dump files, generated by the savecore command, are now saved by default.
The savecore -L command is a new feature which enables you to get a crash dump of the live running Solaris operating environment. This command is intended for troubleshooting a running system by taking a snapshot of memory during some bad state--such as a transient performance problem or service outage. If the system is up and you can still run some commands, you can execute the savecore -L to save a snapshot of the system to the dump device, and then immediately write out the crash dump files to your savecore directory. Because the system is still running, you may only use savecore -L if you have configured a dedicated dump device.
The /usr/sbin/dumpadm command manages a system's crash dump configuration parameters. The following table describes dumpadm's configuration parameters.
Dump Parameter |
Description |
---|---|
dump device |
The device that stores dump data temporarily as the system crashes. When the dump device is not the swap area, savecore runs in the background, which speeds up the boot process. |
savecore directory |
The directory that stores system crash dump files. |
dump content |
Type of data, kernel memory or all of memory, to dump. |
minimum free space |
Minimum amount of free space required in the savecore directory after saving crash dump files. If no minimum free space has been configured, the default is one megabyte. |
See dumpadm(1M) for more information.
The dump configuration parameters managed by the dumpadm command are stored in the /etc/dumpadm.conf file.
Do not /etc/dumpadm.conf edit manually. This could result in an inconsistent system dump configuration.
During system startup, the dumpadm command is invoked by the /etc/init.d/savecore script to configure crash dumps parameters based on information in the /etc/dumpadm.conf file.
Specifically, it initializes the dump device and the dump content through the /dev/dump interface.
After the dump configuration is complete, the savecore script looks for the location of the crash dump file directory by parsing the content of /etc/dumpadm.conf file. Then, savecore is invoked to check for crash dumps. It will also check the content of the minfree file in the crash dump directory.