A.P. Lawrence

swap dump is selective

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From: Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com>
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thush2@my-deja.com wrote:
> 
> I have physical RAM 512MB and when I use sco's equation(pg 59 of admin
> guide) I calculate swap space to be 263MB. But when I allocate like
> that at startup it warns "not enough space and dump will be selective".
> I don't use /dev/dump.
> 1. Is this swap figure correct ?

There's no such thing as "correct".  It's a reasonable amount for
swap, it's a lousy amount for dump.  See
/Boot/swap.html

> 2. do I have to allocate /dev/dump to get rid of that warning ?

Or increase swap.  But realistically, very few of us need to be
concerned with saving full kernel dumps or even saving dumps at
all.  In 17 years of doing this..um, stuff.., I can't even think
of one instance where a panic dump has actually been needed. 
What causes panic crashes?  Nowadays, bad hardware is the most
common cause, and hardware is cheap- usually much cheaper than
hiring someone to analyze a dump.  If you have a kernel that's
been running along with no problems for years and it suddenly
panics, it's pretty much a "duh!" that memory or cpu has gone
south.  Bad code does happen, of course, but 99 times out of a
hundred, you know it's the driver you just added, so what do you
need the dump for?  Of course if you are doing driver development
that's different, but for most of us, a dump is superfluous.

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