partial dumps (was Re: Change default dumpdir to /usr/crash?)

 > On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 02:30:40PM +0200, Thomas Quinot wrote:

 > > The proper fix would probably be to change the default partitioning
 > > scheme, not to move the crash dumps. I think one property we try to
 > > guarantee is that /usr be mountable read-only through NFS for a cluster
 > > of workstations, whereas /var is always mounted read-write, for its
 > > purpose is to contain files whose contents *vary* over time.

Another good idea (perhaps in combination with a larger /var) is to
accept and port to -current the Duke "partial dump" patches. These
patches allow the user to optionally dump just the kernel virtual
address space.  This results in dumps that are generally less than
100MB, rather than multiple gigs.

In nearly all cases, only the kernel address space is needed to
interpret a dump.  From what I've seen, this is what Solaris, AIX, and
Tru64 do by default.

Porting to -current will be non-trivial because of the dump changes
between 4.x and 5.x.   If I was to do this, is there any chance that 
it could get into the tree?


Drew