On 08/16/2016 10:27 AM, christophe leroy wrote:

If I debug a very small app, it gets stuck quickly after the app has
stopped: indeed, the console seems ok but as soon as I try to execute
something simple, like a ps or top, it get stuck. The target still
responds to pings, but nothing else.

This one is a pretty common symptom when the kernel crashes holding a
per-process lock of some kind, probably most commonly mmap_sem.

Do you have a serial console?  Can you do a sysrq-t on it to get stack
dumps of the hung processes and ps?

It's time to turn on all the debugging options we can find.  Can you
build a kernel with all this stuff enabled (=y on all of these):

CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG
CONFIG_DEBUG_VM
CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC
CONFIG_PAGE_POISONING
CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG_ON
CONFIG_KASAN
CONFIG_*LOCKUP_DETECTOR
CONFIG_DETECT_HUNG_TASK
CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG
CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT
CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ

And all of the spinlock/lockdep stuff enabled too:

CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC=y
CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING=y
CONFIG_LOCKDEP=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_STACKTRACE=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST=y

Let's hope that these turn something up.