How to test the kernel for kernel panics?

Question

I am testing the Linux Kernel on an embedded device and would like to find situations / scenarios in which Linux Kernel would issue panics.

Can you suggest some test steps (manual or code automated) to create Kernel panics?

Answer 1

There's a variety of tools that you can use to try to crash your machine:

crashme tries to execute random code; this is good for testing process lifecycle code.

fsx is a tool to try to exercise the filesystem code extensively; it's good for testing drivers, block io and filesystem code.

The Linux Test Project aims to create a large repository of kernel test cases; it might not be designed with crashing systems in particular, but it may go a long way towards helping you and your team keep everything working as planned. (Note that the LTP isn't proscriptive -- the kernel community doesn't treat their tests as anything important -- but the LTP team tries very hard to be descriptive about what the kernel does and doesn't do.)

If your device is network-connected, you can run nmap against it, using a variety of scanning options: -sV --version-all will try to find versions of all services running (this can be stressful), -O --osscan-guess will try to determine the operating system by throwing strange network packets at the machine and guessing by responses what the output is.

The nessus scanning tool also does version identification of running services; it may or may not offer any improvements over nmap, though.

You can also hand your device to users; they figure out the craziest things to do with software, they'll spot bugs you'd never even think to look for. :)