swapon vs savecore dilemma

[Scott Long]

Doug White wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
> It looks like we may need to rethink the way swap is mounted at boot time
> if we want crashdumps to work.
> 
> Recently(?), a change was made so you can no longer open a swap partition
> read/write after it is activated with swapon(8).  In the current boot
> sequence, swap is mounted before the root fsck starts so additional space
> is available if the root fsck needs it.  But at that point no partitions
> are available for writing a core to, so we can't run savecore then.
> 
> Without crashdumps debugging gets kind of interesting.
> 
> Suggestions, other than have separate dump and swap partitions?
> 


I question the wizdom of what you're describing.  If swap space needs to
be made available for fsck to run, then what happens to the crashdump
data that used to be on the swap partition?  Doing a swapon(8) means
that nothing in the swap partition is reliable or consistent anymore.

Scott