kernel panic messages?

[Matthew Seaman]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 06:07:04PM +0000, Ben Paley wrote:

> I want to submit information about a kernel panic which happens at boot time. 
> The machine reboots and I can boot kernel.old: where do I find the logs and 
> traces and things I might need to show to someone who knows what they're 
> doing?

You need to setup your machine to capture the appropriate data after
the panic.  There's general information about how to do that in a
series of articles here:

    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/03/21/Big_Scary_Daemons.html
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/04/04/Big_Scary_Daemons.html

However, you're seeing panics in the boot sequence: if that's actually
early on during booting, the system won't have initialised the disks
systems, so it can't record a crashdump.  Your best recourse in this
situation is to hook up a null-modem cable to the serial port, set the
machine up to use the serial port as the console:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-advanced.html

Use tip(1) or some other terminal emulator on the other end of the
connection, and capture the console output as the machine boots.

If you are inordinately keen, you could try and setup a remote kernel
debugging session:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug-online-gdb.html

but unless you're pretty much up-to-speed with kernel development,
you're probably not going to be able to extract much useful
information that way.

	Cheers,

	Matthew	

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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