[Uncle Skeleton]

I thought the "new" kernel panics were the pretty aqua warning in several languages that "you must restart" and "don't be alarmed."

But ever since a hard drive crashed this week, my EyeTV Hybrid has caused the old kind of KP on my G5, where white-on-black text spills all over the screen. No pretty warning. The EyeTV works fine on a new Mac Pro, btw.

So what's the deal? Why am I getting a "legacy" kernel panic?

[Chuckit]

They "ugly" style still appears in some cases. I've seen it before. Without looking at the kernel source — a headache I'm not eager to get — it's hard to say exactly what cases these are, though. I'd guess it happens when the kernel determines that it isn't safe to write a normal panic log.

[kick52]

i had my powermac open a 26gb log file in console; it froze up completly (after a long 30mins of VM activity), the mouse wouldnt move, nothing was happening, etc.
the strange thing is, i was still browsing the net through airport with my ibook, and lighttpd was still working.
i slept it, and woke it up, but nothing changed.
i restarted, and the 'mac os x quit unexpectedly' warning came up, so i looked at panic.log. it paniced, without displaying anything, but still running as an airport, and WWW server.
weird hey?

panic.log: http://kick52.com/dump/panic.log (LAST entry)

[Art Vandelay]

IIRC, there's a firmware setting that determines how a kernel panic is displayed. You can set a variable in firmware to use the old style.

[kick52]

also, you can boot in verbose mode, which displays kernel etc. messages when you boot up, and it spews the kernel log onto the screen. (apple + v on startup.)