Less known Solaris Features: About crashes and cores - Appendix B: Live crashdumps
With gcore
you can create core dumps of processes without the need to stop them. You can do the same with the crash dumps as well. You can trigger a crash dump without rebooting the system. The command for this task is the savecore
command. The normal task of this program is to take the content of the crash dump device and to create files in the regular filesystem to make them persistent for further studies after the reboot of a system.
How to trigger a live crash dump
A less known option of this command it the -L
option. With this option you can command the system to create a live crash dump. The system isn´t paused while creating the dump, so the live crash dump isn´t self-consistent (the state of the system at the end of the creation may be different than the one at the beginning of this process. Nevertheless a live crash dump is still a useful toll. Triggering the crash dump is really easy as the following example shows.
After the creation of the crash dump you can analyse it with the standard toolset like the mdb
:
This enables you to analyse the state of your system without having to aim for a moving target.