Linux 7.5 To Include New hwpoison-panic Tool For Intentionally Crashing Your System

A new tool expected to be merged to the Linux 7.5 source tree provides a new exercise for the kernel and in the process bringing down the system. The new hwpoison-panic tool is set to be added to the Linux kernel source tree that tests out the vm.panic_on_unrecoverable_memory_failure option for forcing an immediate kernel panic when an unrecoverable memory failures hits specific unrecoverable kernel-owned page types. This tool makes it easy to test the kernel behavior without waiting for multi-bit ECC errors on kernel-owned pages or other similar hardware memory errors. The hwpoison-panic tool to intentionally trigger the kernel panic injects a hardware poison error on a kernel owned page with the ability to target the kernel read-only data "rodata" range, a slab page, or a page-table page. Successfully running the tool will crash the running kernel and thus the --yes-panic-my-kernel argument is also needed to avoid accidentally triggering this tool. Testing with this tool is primarily intended for VMs where the serial console can also be captured for confirming the kernel panic and system crash. Those curious about this hwpoison-panic Linux tool can find the details via this patch queued into Andrew Morton's MM Git "for-next" branch ahead of Linux 7.5.