> Subject: what use is a glass dagger?

Let me guess, a Larry Niven fan. :-)

> what use is a crash dump?

Debugging, mostly.  It's the kernel analogue of a core dump.  There's
some way to coax gdb into using the thing, I believe - gdb -k,
probably.

> actually, it did tell me something as it was crashing:

> panic: ufs_direnter2: compact2

> is that of any use to anybody?

Probably.  Grep through the kernel sources for that message and you'll
find it in sys/ufs/ufs_lookup.c.  Read the surrounding code and you'll
see that (if I am reading the code correctly) it indicates that it was
trying to write a directory entry, didn't have space but was told that
garbage-collecting a certain block would produce enough space, and
found that it wasn't so.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu