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

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 03 May 2004 10:17 am, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
>  > On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 02:30:40PM +0200, Thomas Quinot wrote:
>  > > The proper fix would probably be to change the default partitioning
>  > > scheme, not to move the crash dumps. I think one property we try to
>  > > guarantee is that /usr be mountable read-only through NFS for a
>  > > cluster of workstations, whereas /var is always mounted read-write,
>  > > for its purpose is to contain files whose contents *vary* over time.
>
> 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?

This sounds like an excellent idea!

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org