A fatal system error, also known as a system crash, stop error, kernel error, or bug check, is when an operating system halts the moment it reaches a condition where it cannot operate safely.
In Microsoft Windows, a fatal system error can be deliberately caused from a kernel-mode driver with either the KeBugCheck or KeBugCheckEx function. However, this should only be done as a last option when a critical driver has corrupted data and it is impossible to recover from the problem. This is a design based on the Unix-like way of kernel panicking and logging. Windows is not the first operating system to use the term Bugcheck for this function. For example, VMS used this terminology several years before Windows was developed. Facilities such as these help in debugging error conditions from which the operating system cannot, or decides that it should not attempt to, recover.
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Famous quotes containing the words fatal, system and/or error:
“Knowledge, like matter, [my father] would affirm, was divisible in infinitum;Mthat the grains and scruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world.—In a word, he would say, error was error,—no matter where it fell,—whether in a fraction,—or a pound,—’twas alike fatal to truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)
“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)