svn commit: r212964 - head/sys/kern

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, September 22, 2010 5:24:41 pm Bruce Cran wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:02:30 +0300
> Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > But what was the reason that dumpdev="AUTO" was reverted?
> > I remember that POLA was quoted at the time.
> > I am not sure what the astonishment actually was - perhaps 'AUTO' was
> > not smart enough and destroyed somebody's data?
> > 
> 
> The problem with "AUTO" is that it takes time to do the dump unless
> using textdumps; it also has the potential of failing and leaving the
> system unusable until someone resets it. I believe the argument was
> that for production servers you want the system to be up and running
> again as soon as possible after a crash.

minidumps have made the time issue less of a concern on large-memory systems 
(full dumps do indeed take a long time on modern systems).  I think textdumps 
are just as likely to fail as regular dumps though since they both use the 
same code for writing out the dump, they just write different bits to the dump 
area.

-- 
John Baldwin