When a VxFS kernel message displays on the system console, it is preceded by a numerical ID shown in the msgcnt field. This ID number increases with each instance of the message to guarantee that the sequence of events is known when analyzing file system problems.

Each message is also written to an internal kernel buffer that you can view in the file /var/log/messages.

In some cases, additional data is written to the kernel buffer. For example, if an inode is marked bad, the contents of the bad inode are written. When an error message is displayed on the console, you can use the unique message ID to find the message in /var/log/messages and obtain the additional information.