why panic(9) ?

[Gary Jennejohn]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:28:30 -0800
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On 01/23/2011 15:00, David Demelier wrote:
> > In any case, when panic occurs, switching display to the tty can be
> > great. Why not a sysctl like kern.tty_on_panic? Because when you're
> > running X and a panic occurs not everybody understand what happens.
> 
> Putting the following in /etc/sysctl.conf can help:
> 
> debug.debugger_on_panic=0
> 
> The reason being that sometimes when you panic in X the system is 
> attempting to drop to the debugger, but can't, which is why it hangs.
> 

For what it's worth this appears to be the default on -current.

-- 
Gary Jennejohn