kernel panic

[Matthew Dillon]

:I made this change and shortly got another hang.  I was in X messing
:around with a vkernel and was typing away when everything froze.  I
:waited a bit after trying CTRL-ALT-ESC, CTRL-ALT-BKSP, CTRL-ALT-DEL,
:and anything else I could think of, but the machine was frozen.  So I
:held the power button down for 5s or so and rebooted.  After checking
:my filesystems, what do you know another coredump was found and it is
:the same as last time.  I am positive that I'm not looking at the
:wrong vmcore.  I am inclined to believe that no coredump was ever
:written to my swap partition or perhaps only a part of a coredump was
:written before I power cycled the laptop.  I'm going to try to trigger
:this running from the system console versus in X and see if I can get
:into the debugger.  
:
:Joe

    If you have a serial port you can run a serial console to another 
    machine.  If not you do have another option, and that is to compile
    a kernel with:

    options DDB_UNATTENDED

    Hopefully when it crashes it will be able to write the core out.  If
    it does, you should see the hard drive light for your laptop flicker
    or go solid for however long it takes to write out the core.

    Note: Do *NOT* hard power cycle your machine while it is writing to the
    hard drive.  That's a great way to destroy the hard drive.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>