[robespierre]

TLB Miss exceptions are expected and occur frequently, because the TLB is far too small to hold all the pages that can be accessed. MIPS uses a software table-walk scheme, so each time a virtual memory address from a mapped segment misses in the TLB, software takes an exception to load the proper mapping into the TLB and restart the instruction.

In this panic report, the code that was executing is in kseg0 (Exception PC: 0x8ff9c39c, Exception RA: 0x8ff9a234).
The BadVAddr is 0x1c, which is a mapped virtual address in useg—and is a suspicious address, being so close to zero (null pointer). This could be caused by an uninitialized parameter used to reference a structure.

The code that was running was unprepared to handle a TLB Refill, so the handler that was put at the UTLB vector (0x80000000 or 0x00000000 physical) just dumps some information and halts. This would be the case early in Unix startup before the process machinery is set up.