 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Guru Meditation" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Guru Meditation is an error notice originally displayed by theAmiga computer when itcrashes. It is now also used byVarnish,[1] a software component used by many content-heavy websites. This has led to many internet users seeing a "Guru Meditation" message (or the variant "Guru Mediation")[2] when these websites suffer crashes or other issues. It is analogous to the "Blue Screen of Death" inMicrosoft Windowsoperating systems, or akernel panic inUnix.
It has also been used as a message for unrecoverable errors in software packages such asVirtualBox[3] and other operating systems (see Legacy section below).
The term "Guru Meditation Error" originated as an in-house joke in Amiga's early days. The company had a product called theJoyboard for theAtari 2600home video game console, a game controller much like ajoystick but operated by the feet, similar to theWii Balance Board. Early in the development of the Amiga computer operating system, the company's developers became so frustrated with the system's frequentcrashes that, as a relaxation technique, a game was developed where a person would sit cross-legged on the Joyboard, resembling an Indianguru.[4] The player tried to remain extremely still; the winner of the game stayed still the longest. If the player moved too much, a "guru meditation" error occurred.[5]
The alert occurred when there was a fatal problem with the system. If the system had no means of recovery, it could display the alert, even in systems with numerous critical flaws. In extreme cases, the alert could even be displayed if the system's memory was completely exhausted.
The text of the alert messages was completely baffling to most users. Only highly technically adept Amiga users would know, for example, that exception 3 was an address error, and meant the program was accessing a word on an unaligned boundary. Users without this specialized knowledge would have no recourse but to look for a "Guru" or to simply reboot the machine and hope for the best.
When a Guru Meditation is displayed, the options are toreboot by pressing the left mouse button, or to invoke ROMWack by pressing the right mouse button or to manually reboot. ROMWack is a minimalistdebugger built into theoperating system which is accessible by connecting a 9600bit/s terminal to theserial port.
The alert itself appears as a black rectangular box located in the upper portion of the screen. Its border and text are red for a normal Guru Meditation, or green/yellow for a Recoverable Alert, another kind of Guru Meditation. The screen may go black, but the powerLEDs always alternates between full and half-brightness for a few seconds before the alert appears. InAmigaOS 1.x, programmed inROMs known asKickstart 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, the errors are always red. In AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, recoverable alerts are yellow, except for some very early versions of 2.x where they were green.
Dead-end alerts are always red and terminal in all OS versions except in a rare series of events, as in when a deprecated Kickstart (example: 1.1) program conditionally boots from disk on a more advanced Kickstart 3.x ROM Amiga running in compatibility mode (therefore eschewing the on-disk OS) and crashes with a red Guru Meditation but subsequently restores itself by pressing the left mouse button, the newer Kickstart recognizing an inadvised low level chipset call for the older ROM directly poking the hardware, and addressing it.
The error is displayed as twofields, separated by a period. The format is#0000000x.yyyyyyyy in case of a CPU error, or#aabbcccc.dddddddd in case of a system software error. The first field is either theMotorola 68000 exception number that occurred (if a CPU error occurs) or an internal error identifier (such as an "Out of Memory" code), in case of a system software error. The second can be the address of aTask structure, or the address of a memory block whose allocation or deallocation failed. It is never the address of the code that caused the error. If the cause of the crash is uncertain, this number is rendered as48454C50, which stands for "HELP" in hexadecimalASCII characters (48=H, 45=E, 4C=L, 50=P).
There was a commercially available error handler for AmigaOS, before version 2.04, called GOMF (Get Outta My Face) made by Hypertek/Silicon Springs Development corp. It was able to deal with many kinds of errors and gave the user a choice to either remove the offending process and associated screen, or allow the machine to show the Guru Meditation. In many cases, removal of the offending process gave one the choice to save one's data and exit running programs before rebooting the system. When the damage was not extensive, one was able to continue using the machine. However, it did not save the user from all errors, as one may have still seen this error occasionally.
Recoverable Alerts are non-critical crashes in the computer system. In most cases, it is possible to resume work and save files after a Recoverable Alert, while a normal, red Guru Meditation always results in an immediate reboot.
It is, however, still recommended to reboot as soon as possible after encountering a Recoverable Alert, because the system may be in an unpredictable state that can cause data corruption.[citation needed]
The first byte specifies the area of the system affected. The top bit will be set if the error is a dead end alert.[citation needed]
| Area of system | Value | Specific part of system |
|---|---|---|
| Libraries | 01 | Exec library |
| 02 | Graphics library | |
| 03 | Layers library | |
| 04 | Intuition library | |
| 05 | Math library | |
| 06 | CList library | |
| 07 | AmigaDOS library | |
| 08 | RAM Handler library | |
| 09 | Icons library | |
| Devices | 10 | Audio device |
| 11 | Console device | |
| 12 | Gameport device | |
| 13 | Keyboard device | |
| 14 | Trackdisk device | |
| 15 | Timer device | |
| Resources | 20 | CIA resource |
| 21 | Disk resource | |
| 22 | Misc resource | |
| Other areas | 30 | Bootstrap |
| 31 | Workbench | |
| 32 | Diskcopy |
This section explains the meaning of different error causes, printed in parens afterGuru Meditation Error: Core panic'ed message.