If you need to debug a panic on a remote FreeBSD system, but don't want to transfer large coredumps, and can't afford the downtime caused by KDB interrupting the boot process, a text dump may be the answer. textdump(4) is the kernel dump facility, which allows you to see the crash information in a text format. It also allows for configuration of exactly what information is captured, by scripting input as if you were at the KDB prompt on the console.
Textdump has certain requirements. First, you must be running FreeBSD 7.1 or higher, and your kernel config must include the following options.
options DDB
options KDB
options KDB_UNATTENDED
options KDB_TRACE