1. < operating system > What Unix does when a critical internal consistency checks fails in such a way that Unix cannot continue. The kernel attempts to print a short message on the console and write an image of memory into the swap area on disk. This can be analysed later using adb . The kernel will then either wait in a tight loop until the machine is rebooted or will initiate an automatic reboot .
Unix manual page : panic(8).
2. Action taken by software which discovers some fatal problem which prevents it from continuing to run.
(1995-03-01)