During my testing of our setup for our unmanaged KVM product I needed a way to force a real kernel panic so that I could test some of our systems. After some research I came across this blog comment that is a simple, straight forward way to cause a *real* kernel panic through the use of a custom kernel module.
To do this you’re going to need the basic build tools (make, etc) as well as your kernel headers. On Debian you can get these by running:
apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
Once you have your build tools setup make a new directory to do our work in, I called mine: force_panic
In this directory we’re going to need to setup two files; a Makefile to build the module and the actual .c file that contains the code for the module. Their contents are below:
Makefile
obj-m := force_panic.o
KDIR := /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build
PWD := $(shell pwd)
default:
$(MAKE) -C $(KDIR) SUBDIRS=$(PWD) modules
force_panic.c
#ifdef __KERNEL__
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
static int __init panic_init(void)
{
panic("force-panic");
return 0;
}
static void __exit panic_exit(void)
{
}
module_init(panic_init);
module_exit(panic_exit);
#endif
Now to build the module just issue the command:
make
Once the build process is completed you should be left with a new file named force_panic.ko and you can panic your system by running:
insmod ./force_panic.ko
BIG FAT WARNING — The instant you hit enter on the above insmod command your system will halt. You made it panic after all…
Greets to the author of the original post & comment.
