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

Administering a System: Managing Disks and Files

Managing Swap and Dump

Chapter 6 671

NOTE If the location of your primary swap device has been speciﬁed in the

system conﬁguration ﬁle, then if it is changed or removed from this ﬁle,

you must regenerate the kernel and reboot. (The default system

conﬁguration ﬁle is /stand/system; see conﬁg (1M) for more

information).

If the primary swap device is not speciﬁed in the conﬁguration ﬁle and

this ﬁle does not include swap default, then the primary swap device

must be the ﬁrst device speciﬁed as swap in /etc/fstab. By listing swap

devices in /etc/fstab, the swap devices will automatically be enabled

when the system is rebooted. In this case, if you change or remove the

ﬁrst swap device speciﬁed from /etc/fstab, the kernel does not need to

be reconﬁgured.

File system swap is always secondary swap. Use SAM to conﬁgure ﬁle

system swap and thereby set up the optional secondary swap.

Conﬁguring Dump

NOTE This section gives general information on conﬁguring disk space for

dump. For a detailed discussion of system crash dumps and how to

conﬁgure them, see “Abnormal System Shutdowns” on page 531.

A dump area is disk space used to write an image of the core memory

after a system crash. The analysis of a core dump may be useful in

troubleshooting and restoring the system to working order.

By default, the primary swap device also serves as a dump area when no

other dump area is speciﬁcally designated. Although you are not

required to retain primary swap as your dump area, doing so will

conserve disk space. You can conﬁgure a different or multiple dump

devices on your system. To do this, you will need to create a logical

volume (or disk section) as a dump device. This device can also be used, if

you wish, for swap.

With the 11.0 release, dump conﬁguration allows for not only selecting

which devices are to be used to store a crash dump, as in prior releases,

but also, how much if any of the dump you wish to retain. Dumps no