From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Feb 3 13:25:44 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.nbrewer.com (unknown [208.42.68.70]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3E61E37B4EC for ; Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:25:25 -0800 (PST) Received: by mail.nbrewer.com (Postfix, from userid 1009) id 43CF25A5; Sat, 3 Feb 2001 15:25:24 -0600 (CST) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 15:25:24 -0600 From: Christopher Farley To: Vlad Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: PANIC?! what is that? Message-ID: <20010203152523.A24617@northernbrewer.com> Mail-Followup-To: Christopher Farley , Vlad , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <20010203160903.A711@tmd.df.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010203160903.A711@tmd.df.ru>; from tmd@tmd.df.ru on Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 04:09:04PM -0500 Organization: Northern Brewer, St. Paul, MN Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Vlad (tmd@tmd.df.ru) wrote: > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: panic: malloc: lost data > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: syncing disks... 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: giving up on 39 buffers > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: Uptime: 5d12h42m25s > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - press a key on the console to abort > Feb 3 15:43:55 tmd /kernel: Rebooting... > > would anyone please explain to me why did this happen? I'm not sure if this is the 'best' definition, but a panic is an unrecoverable error which occurs in the kernel. Since the system can't recover, it 'panics' and shuts down as gracefully as possible. Speaking as someone who has never seen a FreeBSD kernel panic, I would consider it a *bad thing*, probably the result of a misconfigured custom kernel or a hardware problem. I am no expert in these matters, but malloc is a standard C library call which allocates memory, so I would focus on memory management issues: bad RAM, a failing swap drive, etc. Is it possible to write C code (delibarately or otherwise) that would cause a kernel panic? But please do not take this advice, I merely hazard a guess in the hopes that someone will correct me and I will learn something valuable. -- Christopher Farley www.northernbrewer.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message