Re: [PATCH] Provide ways of crashing the kernel through debugfs

From: Artem Bityutskiy
Date: Thu Jan 28 2010 - 09:39:10 EST


On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 10:53 +0800, AmÃrico Wang wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Simon Kagstrom
> <simon.kagstrom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi Americo!
> >
> > On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:08:28 +0800
> > AmÃrico Wang <xiyou.wangcong@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:56 PM, Simon Kagstrom
> >> <simon.kagstrom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> > For development and testing it's sometimes useful to crash or injure the
> >> > kernel in various ways. This patch adds a debugfs interface to provoke
> >> > null-pointer dereferences, stack corruption, panics, bugons etc. For
> >> > example:
> >> >
> >> > mount -t debugfs debugfs /mnt
> >> > echo 1 > /mnt/provoke-crash/null_dereference
> >> >
> >> > Signed-off-by: Simon Kagstrom <simon.kagstrom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >> > ---
> >> > Obviously this feature is for debugging and testing only, and of
> >> > interest to fairly few people. I've used it for testing the kmsg_dump
> >> > stuff (hence the CC:s above) and kdump, and have found it fairly useful.
> >> >
> >> > If it's not of interest, at least this mail will be in the archives if
> >> > someone else needs something like it :-)
> >>
> >> Hey, we already have /proc/sysrq-trigger, you need to state why
> >> it is better than using /proc/sysrq-trigger.
> >
> > Well, it provides a few more ways of crashing the kernel. That's
> > basically the only additional feature you'll get.
> >
>
> Yeah, I can see that, but why do I need to care how I crash the kernel
> as long as I can crash it in a way.

But Simon did explain in his first e-mail why he cares. You or others
might care for similar reasons.

--
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (ÐÑÑÑÐ ÐÐÑÑÑÐÐÐ)

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