Debugging Mac OS X Kernel Panics

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Introduction

When the kernel crashes on Mac OS X, the system displays a panic message. At this point the system will have to be restarted. But before hitting the reset button, how can one find out what caused the crash?

Kernel panics are often caused by one or more of the following issues; defective or incompatible RAM, incompatible, obsolete, or corrupted kernel extensions, Incompatible, obsolete, or corrupted drivers, hard disk corruption, incorrect permissions or bugs.

James will show how to set up 2 machine kernel debugging, which commands to run to do proper kernel autopsies, and which mail lists to send the results to in order to have someone else tell you what to do next. He'll also briefly cover setting up a Kernel Core Dump server, and how to build a custom kernel.