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A module for crashing the kernel

Posted Jan 28, 2010 4:10 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913)
Parent article: A module for crashing the kernel

What a coincidence, I just today added a hack in the form of a file in /proc/sys/kernel/ to cause an instant panic() if a non-zero value is written there. We need that to test that the hardware watchdog circuit in our platform does the right thing. I guess the need for this "functionality" may be wider than it seems :-)

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Posted Jan 28, 2010 10:24 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Indeed, people in charge of testing highly reliable systems will appreciate this feature quite a lot.

A module for crashing the kernel

Posted Jan 28, 2010 14:57 UTC (Thu) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

Personally this would have been great when I was dealing with failover preparation before moving things to the datacenter. Being able to on demand crash certain VM's (no, not kill them, stop them or so, but really crash them) would have been great, since it's an alltogether different failure mode, and may need special care.

Yes, I really do hope this goes into mainline, It might have to be installed separately in a distribution ofc. but it's still good to have proper debug tools.