Restructured Files

In the Oracle Solaris 11.2 release, the kernel crash dump files have been restructured. The contents of these files are divided into multiple new files based on their contents in order to perform quicker initial analysis and enable more granularity in configuration. The files can more easily be accessed and studied.

Kernel crash dumps were previously stored in the following files:

• vmdump.N

• unix.N

• vmcore.N

The vmdump.N and vmcore.N stored kernel pages metadata and data in compressed or uncompressed form, respectively.

Beginning with the Oracle Solaris 11.2 release, the crash dump information is written to the set of vmdump-section.n files. The section value is the name of a file section that contains a specific kind of dump information. The n value is an integer which increments every time savecore is run to copy a crash dump and a new crash dump is found on the dump device. Possible files include:

vmdump-proc.N

Dump file with compressed process pages

vmdump-zfs.N

Dump file with compressed ZFS metadata

vmdump-other.N

Dump file with other pages

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