On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
Given the author is from matrox.com, it is possible he's working on a
video driver...
What does OS X do if the video driver is hosed? Does it switch to
using Open Firmware for I/O at panic time? Or does it call back into
the possibly hosed video driver which may no longer be able to write
things onto the framebuffer?
You can't use OF for video by the time the Mac OS X kernel starts. The mach console is legacy MkLinux code that still manages to scratch its way to the surface every so often. ;-) Panic messages, AFAICT, take a different path through video_console.c than other text, and I would hope that they don't do any callbacks to the video driver. If it did, you could get something like: 1. Driver init routine panics 2. Mach starts panic display. 3. Oh, driver isn't initted. Call init routine. 4. Go to step 1. Which is a bad thing. I don't see any call-backs, though, so I kind of doubt that's what's happening. At least I hope not. :-) Later, David --------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out my weekly web comic: http://www.techmagazine.org