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

David O'Brien obrien at FreeBSD.ORG
Mon May 3 09:15:53 PDT 2004


On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 10:17:21AM -0400, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
> 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 back it.  I wouldn't need 32GB swap partitions just to
take a dump. :-)

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)


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