Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Abnormal System Shutdowns
Chapter 5532
Overview of the Dump / Save Cycle
Figure 5-1 Overview of the Dump/Save Cycle
When the system crashes, HP-UX tries to save the image of physical
memory, or certain portions of it, to predefined locations called dump
devices. Then, when you next reboot the system, a special utility copies
the memory image from the dump devices to the HP-UX file system area.
When the memory image is in the HP-UX file system, you can analyze it
with a debugger or save it to removable media for shipment to someone
else for analysis.
Prior to HP-UX Release 11.0, devices to be used as dump devices had to
be defined in the kernel configuration, and they still can be. However,
beginning with Release 11.0, a new, more flexible method for defining
dump devices is available.
There are now multiple ways that dump devices can be configured. Here
are three commonly used ways to define dump devices:
• In the kernel (as with releases prior to Release 11.0)
3
1
Dump Devices
2
HP-UX
Filesystem
Disks
Normal Operation
Normal Operation
Crash Processing
Reboot Processing
System Reboot
Resume
SYSTEM
CRASH!
Physical Memory