News Group Posts

trap E kernel panic

From: Tony Lawrence <tony@pcunix.com>
Subject: Re: Kernel error
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 05:18:11 -0500

I wrote:

 > If not, chances are that this is a hardware issue.  See
 > http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/trape.html for example.
 >
 > Certain traps (0E for example) are almost always hardware.  Others
 > are known to be associated with certain drivers or lack of patches
 > etc.  ( http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?arg=105532 for
 > example)
 >
 > If it happens sporadically like this, it's very likely hardware.
 > It's always possible that it's still software, but much more likely
 > to be hardware..

Bela pointed out that I shouldn't be so adamant about "almost always
hardware".  The http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/trape.html article does 
explain that more fully, but he's right: an out of context statement 
like that will probably be misinterpreted and cause no end of trouble 
down the road.

It is true that my field experience with trape E's is that they are 
almost always hardware.  This is especially true when a system has been 
running fine and (without software changes) suddenly starts panicing. 
In this case also, given the sporadic nature, a good bet would be on 
hardware.  But (as I said) it still CAN be drivers or kernel bugs.

-- 


Tony Lawrence
Unix/Linux Support Tips, How-To's, Tests and more: http://aplawrence.com
Free Unix/Linux Consultants list: http://aplawrence.com/consultants.html

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