The dumpadm program is an administrative command that manages the configuration of the operating system crash dump facility. A crash dump is a disk copy of the physical memory of the computer at the time of a fatal system error. When a fatal operating system error occurs, a message describing the error is printed to the console. The operating system then generates a crash dump by writing the contents of physical memory to a predetermined dump device, which is typically a local disk partition. The dump device can be configured by way of dumpadm. Once the crash dump has been written to the dump device, the system will reboot.

Fatal operating system errors can be caused by bugs in the operating system, its associated device drivers and loadable modules, or by faulty hardware. Whatever the cause, the crash dump itself provides invaluable information to your support engineer to aid in diagnosing the problem. As such, it is vital that the crash dump be retrieved and given to your support provider. Following an operating system crash, the savecore(1M) utility is executed automatically during boot to retrieve the crash dump from the dump device, and write it to a pair of files in your file system named unix.X and vmcore.X, where X is an integer identifying the dump. Together, these data files form the saved crash dump. The directory in which the crash dump is saved on reboot can also be configured using dumpadm.

By default, the dump device is configured to be an appropriate swap partition. Swap partitions are disk partitions reserved as virtual memory backing store for the operating system, and thus no permanent information resides there to be overwritten by the dump. See swap(1M). To view the current dump configuration, execute dumpadm with no arguments:

example# dumpadm Dump content: kernel pages Dump device: /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 (swap) Savecore directory: /var/crash/saturn Savecore enabled: yes

When no options are specified, dumpadm prints the current crash dump configuration. The example shows the set of default values: the dump content is set to kernel memory pages only, the dump device is a swap disk partition, the directory for savecore files is set to /var/crash/hostname, and savecore is set to run automatically on reboot.

When one or more options are specified, dumpadm verifies that your changes are valid, and if so, reconfigures the crash dump parameters and displays the resulting configuration. You must be root to view or change dump parameters.

The following options are supported:

-c content-type

Modify the dump configuration so that the crash dump consists of the specified dump content. The content should be one of the following:

kernel

Kernel memory pages only.

all

All memory pages.

curproc

Kernel memory pages, and the memory pages of the process whose thread was currently executing on the CPU on which the crash dump was initiated. If the thread executing on that CPU is a kernel thread not associated with any user process, only kernel pages will be dumped.

-d dump-device

Modify the dump configuration to use the specified dump device. The dump device may one of the following:

dump-device

A specific dump device specified as an absolute pathname, such as /dev/dsk/ cNtNdNsN.

swap

If the special token swap is specified as the dump device, dumpadm examines the active swap entries and selects the most appropriate entry to configure as the dump device. See swap(1M). Refer to the NOTES below for details of the algorithm used to select an appropriate swap entry. When the system is first installed, dumpadm uses swap to determine the initial dump device setting.

-m mink | minm | min%

Create a minfree file in the current savecore directory indicating that savecore should maintain at least the specified amount of free space in the file system where the savecore directory is located. The min argument can be one of the following:

k

A positive integer suffixed with the unit k specifying kilobytes.

m

A positive integer suffixed with the unit m specifying megabytes.

%

A % symbol, indicating that the minfree value should be computed as the specified percentage of the total current size of the file system containing the savecore directory.

The savecore command will consult the minfree file, if present, prior to writing the dump files. If the size of these files would decrease the amount of free disk space below the minfree threshold, no dump files are written and an error message is logged. The administrator should immediately clean up the savecore directory to provide adequate free space, and re-execute the savecore command manually. The administrator can also specify an alternate directory on the savecore command-line.

-n

Modify the dump configuration to not run savecore automatically on reboot. This is not the recommended system configuration; if the dump device is a swap partition, the dump data will be overwritten as the system begins to swap. If savecore is not executed shortly after boot, crash dump retrieval may not be possible.

-r root-dir

Specify an alternate root directory relative to which dumpadm should create files. If no -r argument is specified, the default root directory "/" is used.

-s savecore-dir

Modify the dump configuration to use the specified directory to save files written by savecore. The directory should be an absolute path and exist on the system. If upon reboot the directory does not exist, it will be created prior to the execution of savecore. See the NOTES section below for a discussion of security issues relating to access to the savecore directory. The default savecore directory is /var/crash/hostname where is the output of the -n option to the uname(1) command.

-u

Forcibly update the kernel dump configuration based on the contents of /etc/dumpadm.conf. Normally this option is used only on reboot by the startup script /etc/init.d/savecore, when the dumpadm settings from the previous boot must be restored. Your dump configuration is saved in the configuration file for this purpose. If the configuration file is missing or contains invalid values for any dump properties, the default values are substituted. Following the update, the configuration file is resynchronized with the kernel dump configuration.

-y

Modify the dump configuration to automatically run savecore on reboot. This is the default for this dump setting.

The following exit values are returned:

0

Dump configuration is valid and the specified modifications, if any, were made successfully.

1

A fatal error occurred in either obtaining or modifying the dump configuration.

2

Invalid command line options were specified.

/dev/dump

/etc/init.d/savecore

/etc/dumpadm.conf

savecore-directory/minfree

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

uname(1), savecore(1M), swap(1M), attributes(5)

Dump Device Selection

Dump Device/Swap Device Interaction

Minimum Free Space

Security Issues