Panic! What made my machine crash?
 

I'm running Arch Linux, icewm, and was happily working away last night when suddenly the machine stopped and printed a screenful of kernelesque low-level bafflegab in text mode. No key or mouse action had any effect. I powered off and back on, and now all is fine. At the time, I was merely typing in a "sync" command after copying files to/from an external drive (or was it my camera?)

My camera was handy; a photo of the bafflegab is online at http://www.darenscotwilson.com/spec/panic622.png

Does this look like a one-time "cosmic ray" glitch that I shouldn't worry about? Could it be a sign of a developing hardware problem? Or was it some software that went nuts?

(I first posted this on the Arch site, but soon afterward their server went down.)

So it was YOU and your post that broke the Arch forums ;) I miss the picture game.......

It may have just been a hic up. If it happens again then I would start to be concerned.

Yay! Arch site is back up. As for the panic, this machine is still running okay. Did an update of all packages, so if there was a software bug, it might be gone. If it was a cosmic ray, it'll be a matter of chance...

Yeah there should be IRQ protection against this but I would have to agree it was a hic-up on the kernel's end. I would say that whatever was in the synced buffer, (binary data maybe? O.o) the kernel didn't like it.

I would only be worried if it happens again and even then its likely a bug in the kernel.