What exactly is GPF anyway?
General Protection Fault (usually abbreviated GPF) is the (hopefully) humorous cartoon creation of Jeffrey T. Darlington, filled with intelligent humor, realistic characters, and sentient slime molds. To learn more about the strip itself, please read the following sections of our site: About GPF, the GPF Wiki, Behind the Scenes, and the Comic Archive. For those interested, GPF gets its name from the dreaded “general protection fault” error familiar to regular users of the Microsoft Windows 3.x operating system. The name of the error message changed in Windows 95 and with each subsequent version of Windows, but each version is basically the same. Essentially, if anything went wrong and Windows didn’t know why (which was often the case), it generated a GPF error, which often made the system unstable and usually required the user to “reboot” or restart their computer. While the term “general protection fault” has gone out of use over the years as Windows has “matured,” we still think the
General Protection Fault (usually abbreviated GPF) is the (hopefully) humorous cartoon creation of Jeffrey T. Darlington, filled with intelligent humor, realistic characters, and sentient slime molds. To learn more about the strip itself, please read the following sections of our site: About GPF, the GPF Wiki, Behind the Scenes, and the Comic Archive. For those interested, GPF gets its name from the dreaded “general protection fault” error in Intel x86 and related processors and most familiar to regular users of the Microsoft Windows. The error has been called many different things over the years (“unrecoverable application error”, GPF, “illegal operation”, “segmentation fault”), but they’re all essentially the same thing. From Wikipedia: If the processor detects a protection violation it stops executing the code and sends a General Protection Fault interrupt. In most cases the operating system will simply remove the failing process from the execution queue, signal the user and continu
