Chapter 4. Hey! We Got One!

Whether you were expecting it or not, you’ve discovered that your system has panic’ed. If all went well, savecore did its job and there are now system crash dump files in the savecore directory for you to analyze. However, not every crash goes so well.

Before we move on to analyzing postmortem files, let’s discuss a few other issues regarding system crashes.

What to do when your system has crashed

Depending on the cause of the system crash, the system may not have been able to reboot itself successfully. Cases where this would be true include:

  • Catastrophic hardware failure, such as faulty memory or a crashed disk

  • Major kernel configuration faults, such as a buggy device driver

  • Major kernel tuning errors, such as maxusers ...

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