partial dumps (was Re: Change default dumpdir to /usr/crash?)

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Mon May 3 08:45:40 PDT 2004


In the last episode (May 03), Andrew Gallatin said:
> Another good idea (perhaps in combination with a larger /var) is to
> accept and port to -current the Duke "partial dump" patches. These
> patches allow the user to optionally dump just the kernel virtual
> address space.  This results in dumps that are generally less than
> 100MB, rather than multiple gigs.
> 
> In nearly all cases, only the kernel address space is needed to
> interpret a dump.  From what I've seen, this is what Solaris, AIX,
> and Tru64 do by default.
> 
> Porting to -current will be non-trivial because of the dump changes
> between 4.x and 5.x.  If I was to do this, is there any chance that
> it could get into the tree?

I would certainly hope so!  Even a 4gb x86 machine that otherwise
doesn't need swap at all would benefit, and would reduce the downtime
due to the panic needing to write a full dump, and savecore needing to
copy it out of swap.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


More information about the freebsd-current mailing list