Kernel Core Dumps
I hope someone here can help me out with this…
I’ve been reading through Apple TN2118: Kernel Core Dumps and it seems pretty straight forward. There is one thing I’m not quite getting, though. I can’t seem to find a way to make a machine panic and then dump core to the local disk. It only seems possible to dump to a remote machine running ‘macosxkdump’, not the local disk.
And, well, since I’ve only got one Mac at home, and macosxkdump hasn’t yet been ported to any other OSS platforms (an OpenBSD port would be stellar right about now), I’m kinda sunk.
Has anyone else done this, or come up with a way to get dumps to go to a local disk?
UPDATE: It appears that kdumpd from the network_cmds part of OpenDarwin is all that one needs to handle this. I’ve found postings online which say it’s trivial to port, but I don’t have the skill to do it. :( Would anyone else be up to this task?
It’s pretty easy to enable, but what’s pissing me off now is that you can only dump to network. Unlike the shiny happy Windows / whatever world where they can go to any old disk… Apple machines will only dump to network, and only with the advent of 10.3.
And I just realized that I forgot to post this to the macosx community. heh.
I thought about that, but it’s going to have to hang the kernel in order to dump core. And that will hang anything running locally. :(
Windows does it by having a really low level bit of stuff in the kernel handle the disk write… OS X needs this.