Technical data

CHALLENGE/Onyx Diagnostic Road Map 7-1

Chapter 7

7. IRIX Error Reporting

7.1 Overview

This section describes the various types of UNIX kernel messages displayed by the console.

These messages may also appear in /var/adm/SYSLOG, where they are preﬁxed by

“<systemname> unix:.” Not all kernel messages appear in the SYSLOG ﬁle because a

daemon must be running to transfer the error message from the kernel to the ﬁle. If the

system panics, the kernel messages appear only on the console and in a system core dump.

There are three types of kernel messages:

• Panic messages

• Warning messages

• Driver messages

7.2 Panic Messages

The panic message syntax is PANIC CPU n: xxx, where n is the processor number andxxx is

the string indicating the general area of the fault. The kernel panics when it cannot continue

operation without the risk of corrupting user data. Common causes of kernel panics are:

• problems in the kernel data structures

• processor exceptions taken during kernel code, resulting from a software bug

• processor exceptions taken during kernel code, resulting from a bus timeout when

hardware doesn’t respond to a PIO operation (such as a read/write to a control