A longstanding problem in the linux kernel has been its failure to protect itself against massive kprobe sessions, such as with systemtap scripts such as: probe kernel.function("*") {} The important thing to note is that systemtap is not required to show this problem. "perf probe" can do it, as can the following recipe, which builds an absolutely minimal kprobes-using kernel module, and applies it to function entry points (as gleamed form /proc/kallsyms). (With systemtap, we can easily place probes into the bodies of functions too, and of course that crashes even "harder", but let's leave that till later.) git clone git://sourceware.org/git/systemtap.git cd systemtap/scripts/kprobes_test sh gen_code_all.sh insmod kprobe_module.ko <bang> There may be multiple causes, such as inadequate __kprobes markup, or exception handling, or unknown factors. See also http://sourceware.org/PR275 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=604453
That's http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2725
(Still affects kernel 3.8.0-0.rc4.git5.1 # stap -e 'probe kernel.function("*").call {}' -c 'sleep 1' restarts my x86-64 vm.)
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle. Changing version to '19'. (As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 19 development cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 19 End Of Life. Thank you.) More information and reason for this action is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora19
This really needs to be reported and handled upstream