According to Darren Reed:
>
>I'm sure I've seen this behaviour with swap space and processes being
>killed in commercial Unixes...
>

Swap or physical RAM?  I know on the Suns if it comes up with an
memory error then it tries to fix it using the ECC and put the page
back into service.  If this fails the process is killed - this can
result in a user process dying or the whole machine going down
depending on where the page was.  More often than not, in my
experience, the machine will die so what is the difference between
this and panicing in the first place?  Yeah I know you can argue about
long running processes - but let's face it they are the highest on the
list for getting the memory error since they tend to be large memory
users.  Some days you just cannot win ;-)

-- 
Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, AWA Defence Industries
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  "Upgrading your memory gives you MORE RAM!" - ad in MacWAREHOUSE catalogue.