Chapter 10: Kernel Panic, Lockups, and Hangs
It's unpleasant – that queasy feeling deep in the pit of your stomach, the cold sweat forming on your brow – when you get that dreaded kernel panic message on the console, and those absolute, unforgiving pixels, with the hard cold eye of a god, tell you that the system is effectively dead:
Kernel panic - not syncing: [...]
Why, oh why? – your lamentations are futile. Unless, unless... you don't panic (pun intended), read this chapter, figure out what's going on (by writing your own custom panic handler to help with that), and get on with your life, dude!
In addition to understanding and dealing with kernel panics, we also delve into the causes of kernel lockups, hung tasks, stalls, and how to configure a kernel to detect them. In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:
- Panic! – what happens when a kernel panics
- Writing a custom kernel panic handler...
