News: 0001597812

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux 6.19's Hung Task & System Lockup Detectors Can Provide Greater Insight

([Linux Kernel] 120 Minutes Ago More Dumping)


Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton.

Andrew Morton first sent in the memory management "MM" updates for Linux 6.19. Overall a number of low-level kernel code clean-ups and various minor optimizations:

- A rework to the vmalloc() code to support non-blocking allocations.

- Minor clean-ups to the NUMA node handling code. There are also small optimizations to the NUMA allocation hinting code.

- DAMOS auto-tuning has been enhanced with DAMOS auto-tuned for per-memcg per-node memory usage.

- Optimized logic for handling dirty file folios during page reclaim to reduce some unnecessary work on page reclamation.

- Optimizations to the folio splitting code.

- Support for Transparent Huge Page "THP" migration in zone device-private memory.

More details on the many low-level MM changes for Linux 6.19 via [1]this pull request .

[2]

Following that was the "non-MM" pull from Andrew Morton with a few other interesting changes to note, including the detector dumping enhancements:

- Making BPF symbol names, sizes, and line numbers available to the GDB debugger via the BPF debug info.

- Linux's hung task detector and lockup cases can now dump additional system information on-demand. With new sysctl configuration options used to cause extra information to be dumped when the hung-task or lock-up detectors are triggered. For the hung task detector is the "hung_task_sys_info" sysctl knob that accepts a string like "tasks,mem,timers,locks,ftrace" for specifying which information should be dumped when a hung task is detected. Similarly is the "lockup_sys_info" sysctl for specifying the system information to be dumped when detecting a system lockup. Currently-supported options that can be passed to either hung_task_sys_info and/or lockup_sys_info in a comma-separated string include:

- As covered separately, the [3]Live Update Orchestrator was merged as another big kernel contribution from Google.

More details via the [4]non-MM pull request . Both of these pull requests have been merged.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251203212918.82f1c9d3947940aeae263878@linux-foundation.org/

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=tux_ram_shelter_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-Live-Update-LUO

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251206111533.f1b18ce84d0854b5f6d86a8f@linux-foundation.org/



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