HP-UX 11i v3 Crash Dump Improvements

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4 Configuration Improvements
4.1 Persistent Marking of Dump Devices
In HP-UX 11iv2 there are several mechanisms available for persistent marking of dump
devices (causing the dump configuration to persist across reboots). The mechanism that can
be used depends on whether the dump device is an LVM or VxVM volume, or a raw device,
and includes the following:
• /stand/system: dump devices can be specified in the /stand/system file as described
in the system(4) man page.
• lvlnboot: persistently marks LVM logical volumes as dump devices
• vxvmboot: persistently marks VxVM logical volumes as dump devices
In HP-UX 11i v3, while preserving these mechanisms for backwards compatibility, a new
centralized mechanism is provided:
• crashconf -s: a new crashconf option, -s, provides a unified mechanism for
persistent marking of dump devices
This new option to crashconf(1m) centralizes the dump configuration functionality into a single
mechanism, and deprecates the need for the legacy mechanisms.
Note: Using crashconf –s puts the dump configuration into “config_crashconf_mode” in which only
dump devices marked persistent via crashconf will be persistently configured. In this case markings via
the legacy mechanisms (/stand/system, lvlnboot, vxvmboot) will be ignored. The legacy mode, which
is the default, can be re-enabled via the –o option. See crashconf(1m) for details.
4.2 New/Enhanced command options and tunables
In addition to the new –s and –o options to crashconf(1m), the following new crashconf
options are provided in HP-UX 11i v3:
• –l new option to display the lun path for each dump device
• –d new option to delete dump devices
• –p new option to enable/disable parallel dump
The –t and –v options have been enhanced to control/display the new parallel dump option.
Dump tunables, dump_compress_on(5) and dump_concurrent_on(5), can also be used to
persistently enable/disable compression or parallel dump. The value of these tunables can be
changed or displayed using the kctune(1m) command.
By default, parallel dump is enabled on HP Integrity servers, and disabled on HP 9000
servers.
4.3 Device File Naming
In HP-UX 11i v3 a device has several names associated with it: the legacy device file names
that correspond to the various paths to the device (as used in versions prior to HP-UX 11i v3),