“Live core” is the crash dump of the live running Solaris system, without actually rebooting or altering the system in any way. This requires understanding of dumpadm and savecore commands. Man pages of these commands can be found online at Sun Documentation site. Find primary memory size:

-bash-3.00# prtconf | grep Memory
Memory size: 8192 Megabytes

Generate the core dump device (good to have its size same as primary memory size)

-bash-3.00# mkfile -n 8G /var/crash/myhost/livecore
-bash-3.00# ls -l /var/crash/myhost/
total 50
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           3 Jan  2 04:33 bounds
-rw------T   1 root     root     8589934592 Jan  2 04:23 livecore

Using dumpadm (Dump administration command), set dump device as the above generated file

-bash-3.00# dumpadm -d /var/crash/myhost/livecore
Dump content: kernel pages
Dump device: /var/crash/myhost/livecore (dedicated)
Savecore directory: /var/crash/myhost
Savecore enabled: yes

Generate live core using savecore:

-bash-3.00# savecore -L
dumping to /var/crash/myhost/livecore, offset 65536, content: kernel
100% done: 564893 pages dumped, compression ratio 2.91, dump succeeded
System dump time: Fri Jan  2 04:26:41 2009
Constructing namelist /var/crash/myhost/unix.29
Constructing corefile /var/crash/myhost/vmcore.29
100% done: 564893 of 564893 pages saved

Core dump generated two files: vmcore.29 and unix.29.

-bash-3.00# ls -l /var/crash/myhost/
total 12284738
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           3 Jan  2 04:33 bounds
-rw------T   1 root     root     8589934592 Jan  2 04:33 livecore
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     1913028 Jan  2 04:30 unix.29
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     4675993600 Jan  2 04:33 vmcore.29

-bash-3.00# file  /var/crash/myhost/vmcore.29
/var/crash/myhost/vmcore.29:     SunOS 5.10 Generic_127127-11 64-bit SPARC crash dump from ''

-bash-3.00# file  /var/crash/myhost/unix.29
/var/crash/myhost/unix.29:       ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 Version 1, UltraSPARC1 Extensions Required, statically linked, not stripped, no debugging information available

Man pages online:

dumpadm (1M) :
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-2240/dumpadm-1m?a=view

savecore (1M) :
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-5166/savecore-1m?a=view