Summary

  • Some common problems are likely to occur in the kernel, such as deadlocks and invalid memory accesses, which in turn can cause a kernel panic.
  • A kernel panic is a defense mechanism against exceptional or erroneous conditions the kernel cannot recover from. It basically disables the system in order to prevent corruption of the file system or other file storage.
  • Mac OS X provides a wide range of useful debugging mechanisms out of the box, ranging from a simple tracing and logging mechanism to the built-in support for remote kernel debugging.
  • Mac OS X can be configured using the kdumpd to accept a core dump from a remote system when it crashes (or if triggered manually). The core dump consists of active/wired memory and can be loaded into ...

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