Thursday, April 05, 2007

A Stupid Device Driver

I wrote a stupid Linux device driver for trouble shooting. :o
It's available here.

An excerpt from README.txt
---
This small module, rye.ko, tries to catch a specific in-kernel event.

At this moment the only supported event is a phenomenon called CSS
(Context Switch Storm) [1, 2, 3].
rye.ko creates a kernel thread on insertion, and the thread monitors
accumulated number of context switches periodically and tests if context
switches rate (per second) gets higher than a threshold given on the
insertion time periodically.
If the rate exceeded the given threshold, it calls panic(). Thus,
using rye.ko with your favorite crash dump utility such as kdump,
you can take good information for your investigation.
---
I hope trouble shooting guys would enjoy with this module. :o

No comments: