On 13/04/2010 00:40, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
For my nickel's worth, I think that there is little or no cause to
enable the administrator to skip the dump -- Solaris, and OpenSolaris,
*are* enterprise grade operating systems. While some people may be
using it on desktops and such, the real motivation for both of these
is for use in Enterprise scenarios.
But that aside, saving the core on panic is such an inexpensive
operation (adding usually only a couple of seconds -- as a kernel dev
I'm well familiar with the cost associated with save core :-) and the
value of having a core so great that I think its a mistake to ever
treat a "dumpless" system as a valid configuration.
This is actually often not true.
I remember E6500 servers when crashdump sizes were about 10-14GB and it
took 15-20 minutes just to save a crushdump. The problem was submitted
and was being worked on, no more crashdump were really needed but while
it was being worked on and box crashed we really liked to get these
15-20 minutes back.
The *only* excuse for not saving core, is insufficient storage. And
that excuse holds no water for *dumping*, since we can always dump to
swap (assuming swap exists).
No, we can't in the ZFS world - if swap is configured as zvol it can't
be used as a dump device as well. Swap on zvol is a default setting both
for Solaris 10 (when installing on ZFS) and Open Solaris.
Actually if one needs to reclaim a storage used by a dump device for
whatever reason, there is currently no official and easy way to do so -
dumpadm -d swap won't work in ZFS world and modifying /etc/dumpadm.conf
is not supported.
The issue of defaults, and installers, sounds to mostly like
distribution bugs, and probably best handled as such.
I agree that default should be that a system dump is configured in. This
is currently the case both in Solaris 10 and Open Solaris worlds. This
case doesn't change it.
The problem with installer is that after rpool has been created and a
dumpdevice configured there is currently no way in ZFS world to destroy
such a pool as the dumpdevice cannot be unconfigured - therefore in
order to restart installation a user has to reboot entire server.
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