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DUMPON(8) BSD System Manager's Manual DUMPON(8) NAME dumpon -- specify a device for crash dumps SYNOPSIS dumpon [-v] special_file dumpon [-v] off DESCRIPTION The dumpon utility is used to specify a device where the kernel can save a crash dump in the case of a panic. Calls to dumpon normally occur from the system multi-user initialization file /etc/rc, controlled by the "dumpdev" variable in the boot time con- figuration file /etc/rc.conf. For most systems the size of the specified dump device must be at least the size of physical memory. Even though an additional header is added to the dump, the BIOS for a platform typically holds back some memory, so it is not usually necessary to size the dump device larger than the ac- tual amount of RAM available in the machine. The -v flag causes dumpon to be verbose about its activity. NOTES Since a panic(9) condition may occur in a situation where the kernel can- not trust its internal representation of the state of any given file sys- tem, one of the system swap devices, and not a device containing a file system, should be used as the dump device. The dumpon utility operates by setting the sysctl(3) MIB variable "kern.dumpdev" to the device number of the designated special_file or to NODEV (meaning that no dumps are to be taken) if special_file is the text string: "off". Since dumpon cannot be used during kernel initialization, the dumpdev variable of loader(8) must be used to enable dumps for system panics which occur during kernel initialization. SEE ALSO sysctl(3), fstab(5), rc.conf(5), config(8), init(8), loader(8), rc(8), savecore(8), swapon(8), panic(9) FILES /dev/{ad,da}?s?b standard swap areas /etc/rc.conf boot-time system configuration BUGS Because the file system layer is already dead by the time a crash dump is taken, it is not possible to send crash dumps directly to a file. HISTORY The dumpon utility appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. BSD May 12, 1995 BSD
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | NOTES | SEE ALSO | FILES | BUGS | HISTORY
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