Re: Suggestions on how to debug kernel crashes where printk and gdb both does not work

On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 10:25 PM Pavel Skripkin [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 22:19:10 +0800
Dongliang Mu [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 9:34 PM Pavel Skripkin [off-list ref]
wrote:

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On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 21:22:43 +0800
Dongliang Mu [off-list ref] wrote:

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Dear kernel developers,

I was trying to debug the crash - memory leak in hwsim_add_one [1]
recently. However, I encountered a disgusting issue: my
breakpoint and printk/pr_alert in the functions that will be
surely executed do not work. The stack trace is in the following.
I wrote this email to ask for some suggestions on how to debug
such cases?

Thanks very much. Looking forward to your reply.

Hi, Dongliang!

This bug is not similar to others on the dashboard. I spent some
time debugging it a week ago. The main problem here, that memory
allocation happens in the boot time:

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[<ffffffff84359255>] kernel_init+0xc/0x1a7 init/main.c:1447

Oh, nice catch. No wonder why my debugging does not work. :(

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and reproducer simply tries to
free this data. You can use ftrace to look at it. Smth like this:

$ echo 'hwsim_*' > $TRACE_DIR/set_ftrace_filter

Thanks for your suggestion.

Do you have any conclusions about this case? If you have found out the
root cause and start writing patches, I will turn my focus to other
cases.

No, I had some busy days and I have nothing about this bug for now.
I've just traced the reproducer execution and that's all :)

I guess, some error handling paths are broken, but Im not sure

In the beginning, I agreed with you. However, after I manually checked
functions: hwsim_probe (initialization) and  hwsim_remove (cleanup),
then things may be different. The cleanup looks correct to me. I would
like to debug but stuck with the debugging process.

And there is another issue: the cleanup function also does not output
anything or hit the breakpoint. I don't quite understand it since the
cleanup is not at the boot time.

Any idea?

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BTW, I only found another possible memory leak after some manual code
review [1]. However, it is not the root cause for this crash.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/1297

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would work.


With regards,
Pavel Skripkin

With regards,
Pavel Skripkin