"PANIC: kernel mode trap. Type 0x0000000E" msg in 386/ix 2.0.2 ?????

[Darryl Richman]

In article <9480 at bunny.GTE.COM> jdg0 at GTE.COM (Jose Diaz-Gonzalez) writes:
"My machine has been crashing about twice daily for the last week or so.
"The msg in the subject line shows up with all the register contents just
"before it crashes.  I have contacted my vendor, they contacted ISC, and
"all they were able to tell me was that it the problem is a hardware
"error.  Now, I've run my diagnostics (I'm using an AT&T 6386E/33) and
"everything appears to be OK.  Does anyone have any idea of what a type
"0x0000000E error means?  This might help me to narrow down the
"alternatives.   Any pointers will be appreciated.  Thanks,

You can do a bit of tracing yorself to see what is going on.  A trap E
is a page fault--which usually means that there is a bad pointer being
followed in the kernel.  You can discover what routine within the kernel
is causing the problem by noting the EIP value in the register dump,
and after rebooting, do "nm -vexp /unix | sort >/tmp/foo".  Then edit
/tmp/foo and look for the first 5 digits or so of the EIP value...the
greatest address less than or equal to your EIP value is the routine
that was executing.

An even easier way to do this is to configure your kernel
with the kernel debugger.  When the panic occurs, you will drop into the
debugger.  Type "stack" to see a stack backtrace.  You will also see the
instruction that caused the fault.  This will give you much more information
with which to use to get an answer out of your reseller, and ultimately,
ISC.

A "hardware error" means nothing.  Either your vendor misunderstood the
reply or hasn't pushed very hard on your behalf.  Unix tends to be a
much harder test of the hardware than the vendor's diagnostics;  we had
a case where a certain vendor was shipping cards that worked fine under
DOS and passed all of their tests just fine, but would never send an
interrupt;  needless to say, Unix found this out quickly.  When discussing
a problem like this, it is extremely important to pass along as much
information about your configuration as possible--all of the boards,
their interrupt and DMA numbers, how much memory, the make, model, and
geometry of the disks (if they are involved), whose motherboard, any
coprocessors, and so on.  All of these things tend to interact.

		--Darryl Richman
-- 
Copyright (c) 1990 Darryl Richman    The views expressed are the author's alone
darryl at ism780c.isc.com 		      INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.-A Kodak Company
 "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong."
	-- H. L. Mencken