Re: How to make a kernel do a system dump

[Dave Anderson <anderson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

For anything short of a hang situation, you can always force
a panic from user space by:

  (1) determining the address of a task's task_struct.pid
  (2) open /dev/mem for writing,
  (3) write a zero into its pid location, and then have the
       targeted task exit.

This initiates an "Attempted to kill the idle task!" panic from
do_exit().

I've made it a command option in our MCLX crash utility --
which modifies its own pid and then exits; LKCD lcrash
could easily be tweaked to do the same.

Dave Anderson
Mission Critical Linux