Persistent storage for a kernel's "dying breath"
lwn.net
lwn.net
Use of the console callbacks avoids issues with potential errors or corruptions within the running system device drivers, while keeping the exception handler footprint small, and also delegating device dependencies over to the console drivers.
The last barrage of hardware errors in the system error log buffer (if any) are specifically and separately captured into a file, too. This ensures that the error-logging tools can easily capture and log errors that arose in the run-up to the crash, and without having to know the details of the virtual memory structures within the crashdump.
VMS can also use its pagefile as temporary storage for a system crashdump.
"Modern macs implement it as an EFI variable. Unsurprisingly, their implementation is incompatible with the EFI spec's implementation of the concept."