Definition of Kernel Panic

What in the hell is a KrnlPanic? Let’s start with “What is a kernel?”. The kernel is the core of your operating system (OS), whether your OS is Linux, Unix or windows. The kernel takes care of all process management (what program runs and when), memory management (which parts of memory get used for what) and also, the kernel takes care of interfacing the OS with your computer’s hardware (disk drives, sound card, modem, network card, etc).

Now…since the kernel is doing all of these extremely important jobs, it stands to reason that if it has an error, it will be a Bad Thing(tm). If you use windows, you know a kernel panic as a “BSOD” or Blue Screen of Death. Or how about “Invalid Page Fault in KERNEL32.DLL”. I’m sure you’ve probably seen both of those. In Linux, a Kernel Panic is normally plainly stated so. At boot time is when you will see most linux panics. I have yet to see a linux kernel panic while the system is running. You may have seen “Kernel Panic: init not found” or “Kernel Panic: VFS unable to mount root fs on 2:00”. All of these previously listed errors are because of something that happened to the kernel that it couldn’t handle, whether it was an access to an invalid memory location or the inability to find the initialization files it requires.

I hope that sufficiently explains things. Oh yeah…KrnlPanic is also my name 😉

– Rick