Installation guide

You can control the default location of the crash directory with the rcmgr

command. For example, to save crash dump ﬁles in the /usr/adm/crash2

directory by default (at each system startup), issue the following command:

# /usr/sbin/rcmgr set SAVECORE_DIR /usr/adm/crash2

If you want the system to return to multiuser mode, regardless of whether

it saved a crash dump, issue the following command:

# /usr/sbin/rcmgr set SAVECORE_FLAGS M

13.6.4 Choosing the Content and Method of Crash Dumps

Crash dumps are compressed and partial by default, but can be full and/or

non compressed if required. Normally, partial crash dumps provide the

information that you need to determine the cause of a crash. However, you

might want the system to generate full crash dumps if you have a

recurring crash problem and partial crash dumps have not been helpful in

ﬁnding the cause of the crash.

A partial crash dump contains the following:

• The crash dump header

• A copy of part of physical memory

The system writes the part of physical memory believed to contain

signiﬁcant information at the time of the system crash, basically kernel

node code and data. By default, the system omits user page table

entries.

A full crash dump contains the following:

• The crash dump header

• A copy of the entire contents of physical memory at the time of the crash

You can modify how crash dumps are taken by adjusting the crash dump

threshold as described in the following section.

13.6.4.1 Adjusting the Primary Swap Partition’s Crash Dump Threshold

To conﬁgure your system so that it writes even small crash dumps to

secondary swap partitions before the primary swap partition, use a large

value for the dump_sp_threshold attribute. As described in

Section 13.6.3, the value you assign to this attribute indicates the amount

of space that you normally want available for system swapping after a

system crash.

To adjust the dump_sp_threshold attribute, issue the sysconfig

command. For example, suppose your primary swap partition is 40 MB. To

Administering Events and Errors 13–21