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
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