Disk space requirement locations

Disk space requirement & locations

At boot time, not all of a system's file systems may be mount' ed at first. Some system administrators may choose to mount certain file systems by hand after the system comes up. When selecting a file system for use with savecore, be sure to select a file system that will be mount 'ed when savecore is run.

Depending on the usage of the system, specifically memory, at the time of a panic, the resulting vmcore. X file may be quite large. At most, it will be the size of memory. Therefore, the system administrator of a system experiencing frequent panics will need to keep an eye on the disk usage on the file system where the savecore files are being stored. If a large server with 512 megabytes of memory panics four times under full usage and load, you could easily find yourself with 2 gigabytes of postmortem files! Archiving the savecore files to tape or another disk may be wise. Remember also that the UNIX compress command can be very helpful in managing the disk space.

If maintaining a certain availability of disk space on the file system where the savecore directory resides is a concern, a file called minfree can be placed in the savecore directory. This file can be used to specify how much space, in kilobytes, must remain available on the file system once the savecore operation is complete.

Note

Early releases of Solaris 1 (SunOS 4.X) and Solaris 2 (SunOS 5.X) contained a bug in that the minimum free value was interpreted as being the amount of space, in kilobytes, required to be free before savecore was run instead of after .