Using Swap partition for Core dump

[Loren M. Lang]

I have a freebsd 5.3 system that ocassionally panics on shutdown so I
thought it might be good to get a core dump of it.  Since I don't have a
partition decidated for that, I thought I might be able to use my swap
partition for it since it's twice the size of my ram and that it's useless
by the time the system panics anyways.  I'm assuming that freebsd doesn't
touch it's core dump partition until it needs to core dump.  Looking
through the system startup scripts I discovered that the system runs a
program called savecore that save a core dump to a file in /var/crash
from a previous crash.  The problem is that this is run after swap has
been turned on.  Since FreeBSD doesn't seem to have a program to format
the swap partition like mkswap in Linux, I'd expect that FreeBSD will
just enable that partition as swap without reconizing that there is a
core dump there.  If this is true, then is there any easy way to save
the core dump automatically, like moving savecore earlier in the
startup, or would I just have to boot into single user mode and try and
save the dump manually everytime?
-- 
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Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

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