HP-UX 11i Version 1.5 System Crash Dump

Crash Dump Conﬁguration

Chapter 1 13

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. If the root disk

is VxFS, the system dumps to a swap partition on the root disk; for

example, /dev/dsk/c

. During runtime the default location can be

changed to dump to another (secondary) disk, but the following

limitations currently apply if you do that:

❏ The default location cannot thereafter be restored during runtime. To

restore the default location, the system must be rebooted.

❏ Any previous contents of the secondary disk will be lost because a

dump will overwrite it from block 0.

In addition to the kernel and logical volume device crash dump

conﬁgurations, there are two other methods and some additional options.

❏ Crash dump conﬁguration can be done during system initialization

(see rc(1M) and rc.config.d(4) man pages)

❏ Crash dump conﬁguration can be done during run time directly

through the crashconf(1M) command. A kernel reboot is not

required.

Conﬁguration of dump devices is modeled on conﬁguration of swap

devices Consider this comparison between them:

Table 1-2

Swap Devices Dump Devices

A system call, swapon(2)

conﬁgures swap devices.

A system call, crashconf(2),

conﬁgures dump devices.

A command, swapon(1M),

can conﬁgure a swap device

named on its command line.

A command, crashconf(1M), can

conﬁgure one or more dump

devices named on its command

line.