Troubleshooting

Brandon Nielsen, Jibec Versio unknown Last review: 2021-02-22

The kernel, like any software, has bugs. It’s a large, complex project and can be difficult to troubleshoot problems. This document covers some basic troubleshooting techniques to help narrow down the root cause of an issue.

Boot failures

Sometimes the kernel fails to boot. Depending on where the problem is in the boot process, there may or may not be any output. Some good first steps are:

  • Remove quiet (enable more log messages) and rhgb (disable graphical boot) from the boot flags. If the text output is too fast to read, add boot_delay=1000 (the number of milliseconds to delay in between printk during boot). You can use a camera to take pictures of the output.

  • Booting with vga=791 (or even just vga=1 if the video card won’t support 791) will put the framebuffer into high resolution mode to get more lines of text on screen, allowing more context for bug analysis.

  • Add initcall_debug parameter, which traces the initcalls as they are executed.

  • If you get no output at all from the kernel, booting with earlyprintk=vga can sometimes yield something of interest.

Hangs and freezes

  • Checking whether or not the CapsLock key (or NumLock or ScrollLock) causes the light on the keyboard to change state can be used as an indication of whether or not the kernel has hung completely, or if there is something else going on.

  • The SysRq magic keys may still work. You may need to add sysrq_always_enabled=1 to the kernel boot command line. See the wiki article on SysRq on usage details.

  • Setting nmi_watchdog=1 on the kernel command line will cause a panic when an NMI watchdog timeout occurs.

Logs to collect

When reporting an issue with the kernel you should always attach the kernel logs, usually collected with the dmesg command. For some types of issues, you may need to collect more logs.

Input issues (touchpad etc.)

Information for collecting logs is documented at the libinput website.

Sound issues

alsa-info.sh provides information about both kernel and userspace components. If you have a working and non-working kernel, you should provide alsa-info.sh for both cases.

Bisecting the kernel

If the problem you’ve encountered isn’t present in older versions of the kernel, it is very helpful to use git-bisect to find the commit that introduced the problem. For a general overview of git-bisect, see its documentation. An outline on how to bisect the kernel is included in the kernel documentation. This guide contains Fedora-specific details.

Bisecting is a time-consuming task, but it’s very straightforward and is often the best way to find the cause of a problem. If you’re really interested in getting the problem you’re seeing fixed, bisecting will speed up the process considerably in most cases.

  1. Find the newest version you can that works. This will be the initial "good" version. The first version you find that doesn’t work will be the initial "bad" version.

  2. Install the dependencies required to build the kernel.

  3. Next, get the source code.

  4. Prepare a .config file. Assuming you’ve got both the good and bad kernel installed, the config for both will be in /boot/.[1]

  5. Start a new git-bisect with git bisect start.

  6. Mark the newest version that works as "good" with git bisect good <tag>. For example: git bisect good v4.16.8.

  7. Mark the first version that does not work as "bad" with git bisect bad <tag>. For example: git bisect bad v4.17.

  8. Build the kernel. Sometimes commits cannot be built. If this happens, skip the commit with git bisect skip.

  9. Install the kernel.

  10. Reboot into the new kernel and test to see if it works.

  11. If the new kernel works, mark it as good with git bisect good. Otherwise, mark it as bad with git bisect bad.

  12. Repeat the previous five steps until you’ve found the commit that introduced the problem.

1. When bisecting between major versions (e.g. v4.16 and v4.15) new configuration options will be added and removed as you bisect. It’s usually safe to select the default.

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