1. 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash', whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. 2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something crashed the OS!" See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run; see gronk out. From Jargon Dictionary

2. A kernel debugging utility, allowing gdb like syntax. The core analysis suite is a self-contained tool that can be used to investigate either live systems, kernel core dumps created from the Kernel Core Dump patch offered by Mission Critical Linux, or kernel core dumps created by the LKCD patch offered by SGI. o The tool is loosely based on the SVR4 crash command, but has been completely integrated with gdb in order to be able to display formatted kernel data structures, disassemble source code, etc. o The current set of available commands consist of common kernel core analysis tools such as a context-specific stack traces, source code disassembly, kernel variable displays, memory display, dumps of linked-lists, etc. In addition, any gdb command may be entered, which in turn will be passed onto the gdb module for execution. o There are several commands that delve deeper into specific kernel subsystems, which also serve as templates for kernel developers to create new commands for analysis of a specific area of interest. Adding a new command is a simple affair, and a quick recompile adds it to the command menu. o The intent is to make the tool independent of Linux version dependencies, building in recognition of major kernel code changes so as to adapt to new kernel versions, while maintaining backwards compatibility. From Debian 3.0r0 APT