[X-Newbies] Re: Kernel crash help.

[Philip J Robar]

On Nov 12, 2005, at 7:07 PM, Charles Martin wrote:

>> From: Philip J Robar <pjrobar at areyoureallythatstupid.org>
>>
>> A properly designed computer should be able to run flat out day in  
>> and day out
>> without problems and I dare say that in general Macs are some of the
>> better designed computers that you can buy.
>
> In theory, you are right. But I live in the real world, where  
> people block the vents, have shedding housepets, and never EVER dust.
>
> I work in a Mac repair shop. Trust me on this -- a can of  
> compressed air and periodic spring cleaning is one of a handful of  
> simple, cheap, useful things will add months if not years to your  
> Mac. :)

Agreed. I've ordered an acquaintance of mine whose PC I keep running  
to put "dust the computer" every 3 months into her Palm calendar with  
an alarm. I'm not sure how she gets so much dust into it, but the  
last time I opened it the heat sink was literally clogged with dust.

>> It's far more likely that Brian just happened to tickle a bug in  
>> the graphics driver and/or kernel.
>
> I *did* bracket my comment as a "wild guess," but if we assume that  
> YOU are correct (and there's every chance that you are), how does  
> this change my overall advice of "well then don't do that?"
>
> If you'll recall, he said he was running Mail, Safari and two P2P  
> programs at the time, right? Okay, now while I can't claim to know  
> what kind of bug reports Apple gets from Mail and Safari, I'm quite  
> confident that they don't generally cause kernel panics. So that  
> leaves the P2P programs and their associated processes as the  
> primary suspects. I advised him to stop using those (inferring that  
> doing so would clear up the issue).

Without getting into a detailed discussion of device I/O and how an  
OS should handle memory exhaustion, whether it's Mail, Safari, or a  
P2P program a user land program can't cause a kernel panic. It takes  
bad hardware or buggy privileged code to do this. I took a closer  
look at the stack trace and Brian ran into a bug in the NVidia  
graphics driver and the fact that a couple of P2P programs where  
running at the time is just a coincidence.


Phil