problem with saving core on FreeBSD-4.9

[Jonas Bülow]

Hi,

When my machine boots after a panic (which happens to frequently lately) 
it failes to save the kernel core file. This makes it very hard to debug 
the problem. The machine has 512MB of RAM as you can see.

The console output is:

....
Checking for core dump: dumplo = 537526272 (1049856 * 512)
savecore: reboot after panic: page fault
Jan 21 12:30:06 localhost savecore: reboot after panic: page fault
savecore: system went down at Wed Jan 21 12:23:45 2004
savecore: writing compressed core to /usr/crash/vmcore.16.gz
savecore: /usr/crash/vmcore.16.gz: Illegal seek
Jan 21 12:30:06 localhost savecore: /usr/crash/vmcore.16.gz: Illegal seek
savecore: WARNING: vmcore may be incomplete
....



I have the following flags in rc.conf:

dumpdev="/dev/ad0s3b"
dumpdir="/usr/crash"
savecore_flags="-v -z"


Other info:

# ls -l /usr/crash/vmcore.16.gz
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  10 Jan 21 12:30 /usr/crash/vmcore.16.gz

#swapinfo

Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Type
/dev/ad0s3b       1048448        0  1048448     0%    Interleaved

#df -h /usr/crash

Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s3e    28G    20G   5.7G    78%    /usr


Any suggestions on whats wrong here? Any obvious misstake I'm doing?

/jonas