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Troubleshooting system-level problems

Getting the EIP number

The EIP (instruction pointer) value can be calculated from the contents of the CPU registers that are displayed on the console when the system panics. The EIP value is the address of the instruction the kernel was executing at the time of the panic.

To calculate the EIP value, join the register values for the Code Segment (cs register) and the Instruction Pointer (eip register) as a pair of numbers, separated by a colon, and without the leading zeros. In the sample above, these two values are at the beginning of line 4. The value of cs is 0x00000158 and the value of eip is 0xD007488. Therefore, the EIP value is 158:D0070488.

The EIP values of several panics can be compared to indicate whether the panics are being caused by a software or hardware condition. Three or more identical EIP values usually indicate a software problem; successive panics with different EIP values indicate a hardware problem such as a bad memory board. This is not a hard and fast rule; defective RAM can cause multiple panics with the same EIP value, for example.


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SCO OpenServer Release 6.0.0 -- 03 June 2005