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From: jackv@turnkey.tcc.com (Jack F. Vogel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: NOTICE: getcpages - waiting for 1 contiguous pages
Keywords: Esix 5.3.2-D, panic
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.152901.29223@turnkey.tcc.com>
Date: 18 Jun 91 15:29:01 GMT
References: <1991Jun15.205327.10904@turnkey.tcc.com> <1991Jun16.022105.3198@unixland.natick.ma.us> <1991Jun16.123322.10406@cti-software.nl> <1991Jun18.002018.1899@unixland.natick.ma.us>
Reply-To: jackv@turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel)
Organization: Turnkey Computer Consultants, Westchester, CA
Lines: 31

In article <1991Jun18.002018.1899@unixland.natick.ma.us> bill@unixland.natick.ma.us (Bill Heiser) writes:
>
>What's /dev/osm and "Operating System Messages?"  
>
>I don't think ESIX has such a thing to be configured into the kernel.
>Anyone out there know about this?
 
"Operating System Messages" is a facility that can be installed in your
kernel. It is basically a special set of kernel printf()'s, I am not
sure about its implementation in SvR3, but in the AIX kernel these are
called 'ncprintf()'s. The idea is that these message strings are not
displayed on the console, rather they are written to a kernel internal
circular data buffer (called osmbuf in AIX anyway). These are messages
that are generally more technical than the average administrator would
probably care about, but at times particularly when debugging a problem
they might be useful. /dev/osm is the entry point to allow you to
access that kernel buffer, you would typically 'cat /dev/osm' to see
its current contents. At least with AIX if you have syslogd running
it also writes that content into /usr/adm/messages I believe.

I can't say for Esix but ISC does have the OSM option, it is one of the
facilities that can be installed when running kconfig. And there is a
/dev/osm on my system, although I don't have the facility installed.

Disclaimer: I'm a kernel hacker, not a company spokesweenie :-}.


-- 
Jack F. Vogel			jackv@locus.com
AIX370 Technical Support	       - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv@turnkey.TCC.COM