xref: /freebsd/share/man/man9/panic.9 (revision fa9896e082a1046ff4fbc75fcba4d18d1f2efc19)

.\"     $NetBSD: panic.9,v 1.2 1996/10/09 17:20:04 explorer Exp $
.\"
.\" SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-4-Clause
.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 1996 Michael Graff.
.\" All rights reserved.
.\" Copyright (c) 2023 The FreeBSD Foundation
.\"
.\" Portions of this documentation were written by Mitchell Horne
.\" under sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation.
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.\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
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.\"    must display the following acknowledgement:
.\"      This product includes software developed by Michael Graff
.\"      for the NetBSD Project.
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.Dd March 17, 2023
.Dt PANIC 9
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm panic
.Nd bring down system on fatal error
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.In sys/types.h
.In sys/systm.h
.Vt extern char *panicstr;
.Ft void
.Fn panic "const char *fmt" ...
.Ft void
.Fn vpanic "const char *fmt" "va_list ap"
.Fn KERNEL_PANICKED
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Fn panic
and
.Fn vpanic
functions terminate the running system.
The message
.Fa fmt
is a
.Xr printf 3
style format string.
The message is printed to the console and
.Va panicstr
is set pointing to the address of the message text.
This can be retrieved from a core dump at a later time.
.Pp
Upon entering the
.Fn panic
function the panicking thread disables interrupts and calls
.Xr critical_enter 9 .
This prevents the thread from being preempted or interrupted while the system
is still in a running state.
Next, it will instruct the other CPUs in the system to stop.
This synchronizes with other threads to prevent concurrent panic conditions
from interfering with one another.
In the unlikely event of concurrent panics, only one panicking thread will proceed.
.Pp
Control will be passed to the kernel debugger via
.Fn kdb_enter .
This is conditional on a debugger being installed and enabled by the
.Va debugger_on_panic
variable; see
.Xr ddb 4
and
.Xr gdb 4 .
The debugger may initiate a system reset, or it may eventually return.
.Pp
Finally,
.Xr kern_reboot 9
is called to restart the system, and a kernel dump will be requested.
If
.Fn panic
is called recursively (from the disk sync routines, for example),
.Fn kern_reboot
will be instructed not to sync the disks.
.Pp
The
.Fn vpanic
function implements the main body of
.Fn panic .
It is suitable to be called by functions which perform their own
variable-length argument processing.
In all other cases,
.Fn panic
is preferred.
.Pp
The
.Fn KERNEL_PANICKED
macro is the preferred way to determine if the system has panicked.
It returns a boolean value.
Most often this is used to avoid taking an action that cannot possibly succeed
in a panic context.
.Sh EXECUTION CONTEXT
.\" TODO: This text describes the kernel debugger / kernel dump execution
.\" context as well. It could be moved to a future kdb(9) page, and this
.\" section would become a pointer.
Once the panic has been initiated, code executing in a panic context is subject
to the following restrictions:
.Bl -bullet
.It
Single-threaded execution.
The scheduler is disabled, and other CPUs are stopped/forced idle.
Functions that manipulate the scheduler state must be avoided.
This includes, but is not limited to,
.Xr wakeup 9
and
.Xr sleepqueue 9
functions.
.It
Interrupts are disabled.
Device I/O (e.g. to the console) must be achieved with polling.
.It
Dynamic memory allocation cannot be relied on, and must be avoided.
.It
Lock acquisition/release will be ignored, meaning these operations will appear
to succeed.
.It
Sleeping on a resource is not strictly prohibited, but will result in an
immediate return from the sleep function.
Time-based sleeps such as
.Xr pause 9
may be performed as a busy-wait.
.El
.Sh RETURN VALUES
The
.Fn panic
and
.Fn vpanic
functions do not return.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr printf 3 ,
.Xr ddb 4 ,
.Xr gdb 4 ,
.Xr KASSERT 9 ,
.Xr kern_reboot 9