HP-UX 11i Version 1.
April 27. 2001 © Copyright 2001 © Hewlett-Packard Company, All rights reserved..
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump 1 HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Beginning with the 11.0 release of HP-UX, system crash dump processing (configuration, generation, and use) has been totally revamped. The current functionality is described in this document, in the following sections. ❏ Changes for HP-UX 11i Version 1.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Changes for HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 Changes for HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 The major changes to system crash dump functionality in HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 are largely internal and do not affect the user-level interface: ❏ The boot loader passes user boot arguments through, unchanged, to the kernel, where they are parsed.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Overview of System Crash Dump Overview of System Crash Dump The dump and reboot process is significantly faster than in previous releases of HP-UX, and can handle technologies such as more than 4GB of physical memory, dynamically loaded kernel modules (DLKM), non-contiguous physical memory, and the like. System crash dumps do not contain the entire contents of physical memory by default.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Selective Dumps Selective Dumps In order to dump only those parts of memory that are most useful for debugging a problem, HP-UX divides the pages of memory into several classes. The rightmost column in this table shows which classes of memory are included in a crash dump under most circumstances. However, these defaults can be overridden by the system administrator (see “Crash Dump Configuration” on page 13).
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Crash Dump Configuration Crash Dump Configuration In the HP-UX operating system prior to release 11.0, the only configuration option was the ability to specify which devices would be used to store a crash dump. This option was set during kernel build and only took effect after rebooting the system on the new kernel Now, by default, the system dumps to the swap partition.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Crash Dump Configuration Table 1-2 Swap Devices Dump Devices swapon(1M) can also read /etc/fstab and configure all devices marked as “swap”. crashconf(1M) can also read /etc/fstab and configure all devices marked “dump”. SAM can be used to configure swap devices. SAM can be used to configure swap devices. The primary swap device can also be configured into the kernel at kernel build time.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Crash Dump Configuration and how much space a selective dump will take. This information can be used to determine the amount of dump space that should normally be configured. Specifying “-v ” on the crashconf(1M) command line will display the current crash dump configuration to verify that the expected changes have taken effect.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Dump-Time User Interface Dump-Time User Interface As mentioned above, an operator sitting at a system’s console when it dumps has some control over the process of dumping. The interface is somewhat similar to the boot-time user interface of most HP-UX systems: the dump path prints out what it expects to do, and gives the operator ten seconds to hit a key to indicate that a change from the defaults is desired.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Post-Reboot Dump Processing Post-Reboot Dump Processing Prior to HP-UX 11.0, one of the first user space tasks in the boot process was running savecore (now obsolete), which would check for a crash dump and, if found, copy it from the dump device(s) to the file system. This same program had many other features used by system administrators after the system was up. In HP-UX release 11.
HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump Debugging of Crash Dumps Debugging of Crash Dumps The libcrash library provides debugger owners and others with code that reads crash dumps. This library insulates the debuggers from the details of the crash dump format, allowing them to handle any type of crash dump with equal ease. The main kernel crash dump debuggers, q4 and adb(1), use this library.
