9.3.10 kdump Operational for 8-Socket Database Nodes

In releases earlier than 12.1.2.2.0, kdump, a service that creates and stores kernel crash dumps, was disabled on Exadata 8-socket database nodes because generating the vmcore took too long and consumed too much space. Starting with Exadata release 12.1.2.2.0, kdump is fully operational on 8-socket database nodes due to the following optimizations:

• Hugepages and several other areas of shared memory are now exposed by the Linux kernel to user space, then filtered out by makedumpfile at kernel crash time. This saves both time and space for the vmcore.

• Memory configuration for the kexec kernel has been optimized.

• Overall memory used has been reduced by blocking unnecessary modules.

• Snappy compression is enabled on the database nodes to speed up vmcore generation.