Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@...>, Christoph Lameter <clameter@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, Mel Gorman <mel@...>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@...>, <Yinghai.Lu@...>, <apw@...>, KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@...>, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...>
the method was to notice that the slub_debug_slabs SLUB variable got
corrupted from an expected value of 0 to a value of 0x1.
Then i added a simple brute-force function-tracer hook (in sched-devel)
that checked when slub_debug_slabs went from 0 to 1, and which then
printed a backtrace.
Since under CONFIG_FTRACE=y every kernel function calls this callback,
it triggered immediately after the value got corrupted:
[ 0.000000] console [earlyser0] enabled
[ 0.000000] BUG: slub_debug_slabs: 00000001
[ 0.000000] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.25-rc9-sched-devel.git-x86-latest.git #982
[ 0.000000] [<c0177fba>] print_slub_debug_slabs+0x3a/0x40
[ 0.000000] [<c01050f7>] trace+0x8/0x11
[ 0.000000] [<c0cc929e>] ? mtrr_bp_init+0xe/0x320
[ 0.000000] [<c01050f7>] ? trace+0x8/0x11
[ 0.000000] [<c0cd7369>] ? memory_present+0x9/0x50
[ 0.000000] [<c0cc7a09>] ? find_max_pfn+0x99/0xb0
[ 0.000000] [<c0cc6af7>] setup_arch+0x217/0x470
[ 0.000000] [<c012c59b>] ? printk+0x1b/0x20
[ 0.000000] [<c0cc2b46>] start_kernel+0x96/0x3f0
[ 0.000000] [<c0cc22fd>] i386_start_kernel+0xd/0x10
[ 0.000000] =======================
[ 0.000000] x86: PAT support disabled.
and the backtrace had all the guilty parties on stack - memory_present()
[which was just called] and find_max_pfn()/setup_arch() - thanks to the
new fuzzy "?" backtrace entries we print out in v2.6.25.
(i could also have printed out the current ftrace buffer as well,
showing the history of all recent function calls that the kernel
executed.)
Ingo
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