Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide

`panic()`

void panic(void)

The panic() action causes a kernel panic when triggered. This action should be used to force a system crash dump at a time of interest. You can use this action together with ring buffering and postmortem analysis to understand a problem. For more information, see Chapter 11, Buffers and Buffering and Chapter 37, Postmortem Tracing respectively. When the panic action is used, a panic message appears that denotes the probe causing the panic. For example:

  panic[cpu0]/thread=30001830b80: dtrace: panic action at probe
  syscall::mmap:entry (ecb 300000acfc8)

  000002a10050b840 dtrace:dtrace_probe+518 (fffe, 0, 1830f88, 1830f88,
    30002fb8040, 300000acfc8)
    %l0-3: 0000000000000000 00000300030e4d80 0000030003418000 00000300018c0800
    %l4-7: 000002a10050b980 0000000000000500 0000000000000000 0000000000000502
  000002a10050ba30 genunix:dtrace_systrace_syscall32+44 (0, 2000, 5,
    80000002, 3, 1898400)
    %l0-3: 00000300030de730 0000000002200008 00000000000000e0 000000000184d928
    %l4-7: 00000300030de000 0000000000000730 0000000000000073 0000000000000010

  syncing file systems... 2 done
  dumping to /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1, offset 214827008, content: kernel
  100% done: 11837 pages dumped, compression ratio 4.66, dump
  succeeded
  rebooting...

syslogd(1M) will also emit a message upon reboot:

  Jun 10 16:56:31 machine1 savecore: [ID 570001 auth.error] reboot after panic:
  dtrace: panic action at probe syscall::mmap:entry (ecb 300000acfc8)

The message buffer of the crash dump also contains the probe and ECB responsible for the panic() action.