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panic()) are generally designed to output an error message to the console, dump an image of kernel memory to disk for post-mortem debugging and then either wait for the system to be manually rebooted, or initiate an automatic reboot.[1] The information provided is of highly technical nature and aims to assist a system administrator or software developer in diagnosing the problem.I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"[2]
panic() function was essentially unchanged from Fifth Edition UNIX to the VAX-based UNIX 32V and output only an error message with no other information, then dropped the system into an endless idle loop. As the Unix codebase was enhanced, the panic()function was also enhanced to dump various forms of debugging information to the console.
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