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Has anyone ever seen an error like the one pictured below on Mac OS X? What is it? The system is 10.6.6. I'm quite experienced in OS X but I've never seen such a thing. I was booting in verbose modem, and it looks like the verbose mode came "through".

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Looks like a kernel panic in Verbose mode.

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  • Have you installed anything recently, especially new hardware/drivers or system-level software (kexts, etc.)?
    – Inspire48
    Mar 12, 2011 at 23:09
  • I did but 'm suspecting it was the Blizzard updater. BTW i know it's a kernel panic but i've never seen this "verbose-mode-overlay"
    – Benedikt Bergenthal
    Mar 12, 2011 at 23:11
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    When you have verbose mode enabled you get verbose kernel panics too instead of the "you must restart your computer" screen. (Older versions of Mac OS X always panicked this way.) Certainly, at the least you should contact Rogue Amoeba.
    – Nicholas Riley
    Mar 12, 2011 at 23:34
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It's an old-style kernel panic report. When the kernel crashes, there's no way to log what happened ('cause logging requires a working filesystem, which is part of the kernel...), so OS X used to dump the crash info onto the screen buffer.

In OS X v10.2, they switched to a system where it stores the crash info into PRAM, and displays a message that "You need to restart your computer. Hold the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." in 4 languages. After rebooting, the info is transferred from PRAM to a normal log file.

...but sometimes, for some reason, the old-style panic report still shows up under newer versions of OS X. I haven't seen this happen in a while, but apparently it's still possible under 10.6.6. I have no idea what causes it to revert to the old-style report (maybe verbose mode?).

See Apple's KB article #HT1392 for more details, and examples of the different panic styles.

EDIT: It occurs to me that it might've both written the crash info to the screen, and to PRAM and hence the log files. Check in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and see if there's a matching panic report.

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  • Is there a layman way of reading the cause of a kernel panic? Is it safe to share your logs in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports? Is there any sensitive/private information contained in them?
    – Randy6T9
    Mar 14, 2011 at 6:06
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    @HandyRandy: the panic logs aren't going to be terribly readable to anyone other than a kernel programmer -- in this case, you can tell that the kernel extension "com.rogueamoeba.hermes" was involved (and since the current process was kextd, which loads & unloads kernel extensions, hermes may've either just been loaded or some other extension that conflicts with it just loaded). The logs should generally be safe to share, although it's there's a very small probability something sensitive will happen to be in a register or the call stack when it crashes.
    – Gordon Davisson
    Mar 14, 2011 at 6:57
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It's a kernel panic. Looks like a kernel extension with the bundle identifier "com.rogueamoeba.hermes" (Airfoil?) crashed.

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