Chapter 3. The savecore Program

We’ve already mentioned the savecore command and the savecore files quite a few times. Now we will talk about them in much greater detail.

What is savecore?

savecore is the command we use to transfer the system crash dump image, generated for us by the panic() routine, from the dump device to a file system where we can later access it for analysis.

How does savecore work?

During a system panic, whether forced by the system administrator in response to a system hang or caused by the system, the contents of memory in use at that time are written out to the dump device. When the system is rebooted, savecore can be run to retrieve the image from the dump device and archive it to a disk file. Let’s examine this process in ...

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