alex@umbc3.UMD.EDU (Alex S. Crain) (05/02/88)
>Where are those register dumps documented anyway? I'd much rather >interpet them myself than depend on some bozo in Support Land to >tell me what happened. I would doubt that they are documented at all. When my machine first did it, I called Support land and they said that I had a hardware problem, and gave me a new motherboard. I've had 3 with the new board, so I don't think that it helped. There are only a few things that can go wrong with the kernal, and usually the panic says what happend; ie: page fault in kernal - these are cused by kernal bugs parity errors - these are caused by hardware bugs. running out of things, inodes, clists, etc, these are when the system overloads past its configuration. Use ktune, or fix the user program that caused it. There are a few more, but thats the jist of it. But since we can't recompile the kernal, nad only a few of us are willing to adb our way through it over an occation panic, the second and third types are the only ones that matter. The problem is that the kernal has bugs, just like every other program of its size and complexity, and no one will ever fix them, ever. If you knew what they were, what good would it do? If it helps, I've had 3 panics, all of which seem to be associated with branching from bogus function pointers in a user program. I can't duplicate them, they're like buss errors gone astray, and rerunning the user program doesn't cause a panic. The message is always "page fault in kernal" and I don't get a core image. I suppose that I could use the PC to calculate where the kernal barfed, but since I don"t have source, and those with source don't care.... -- :alex. nerwin!alex@umbc3.umd.edu alex@umbc3.umd.edu