FreeBSD Manual Pages
DUMPON(8) FreeBSD 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 configuration 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 64 kB header is added to the dump, the BIOS for a platform typically holds back some mem- ory, so it is not usually necessary to size the dump device larger than the actual amount of RAM available in the machine. The dumpon utility will refuse to enable a dump device which is smaller than the total amount of physical memory as reported by the hw.physmem sysctl(8) variable. The -v flag causes dumpon to be verbose about its activity. IMPLEMENTATION 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 opening special_file and making a DIOCSKERNELDUMP ioctl(2) request on it to save kernel crash dumps. If special_file is the text string: ``off'', dumpon performs a DIOCSKERNELDUMP ioctl(2) on /dev/null and thus instructs the kernel not to save crash dumps. FILES /dev/{ad,da}?s?b standard swap areas /etc/rc.conf boot-time system configuration SEE ALSO fstab(5), rc.conf(5), config(8), init(8), rc(8), savecore(8), swapon(8), panic(9) HISTORY The dumpon utility appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. 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. FreeBSD 6.2 May 12, 1995 FreeBSD 6.2
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | IMPLEMENTATION NOTES | FILES | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | BUGS
Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dumpon&sektion=8&manpath=FreeBSD+6.2-RELEASE>