Bug Reporting – How to Report a Kernel Panic Bug

bug-reportingkernel

Suppose I have a machine that has no serial port and under certain reproducible situations will kernel panic. Assume I have tested the mainline kernel from the kernel team PPA and know this is an 'upstream kernel' issue.

What information should I gather to file this as a kernel bug, and where should I file it, to get it noticed?

Best Answer

Ubuntu wants us to use apport for reporting bugs. You will be asked a bunch of questions to provide information (so that takes part of the information you need to collect to file a bug report).

This is the official bug reporting method (page has not yet been updated to include links for Natty) with step by step how to in getting you to filing it.

There is just 1 small piece about kernel bugs:

For sound, X drivers, and kernel bugs: please open a new bug instead of commenting 
on a similar bug: chances are that your hardware does not match the existing bug's 
hardware, so the bug will not be addressed.

Good luck and please leave a comment if the answer left any questions :)

Related Solutions

Kernel – Building a New Vanilla Kernel and Handling Produced Debs

To answer the first question Why are there only two packages? or Why aren't there two header files? -- when they're cross compiled, they're packaged up to handle every use case. By splitting the headers into a larger all package and a smaller arch-specific one, you save bandwidth pushing them out to users. When you're doing it yourself, you only need it for one arch so one headers file will do.

As for the symlink through to your source location, I have had the same issue. I have not found a good fix other than to also generate a linux_source package (just add that on after kernel_image kernel_headers) and then fix the symlink manually.

There is actually a question all about this side of things already. The long-term solution seems to be hacking in a script that runs after each kernel installation that just fixes the symink up.

Ubuntu – How to build the mainline kernel source package

Looks like you're brave enough :) you could try following these instructions to create your own .deb packages from the mainline kernel.

Try reading this general document first:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile

Here are specific instructions on how to compile a kernel for 11.10 (although you'd be doing so from the 3.2 source tree, so some things may ebd up being different).

http://blog.avirtualhome.com/2011/10/28/how-to-compile-a-new-ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-kernel/

Now, the problem with these instructions is they assume a source tree with a debian/ directory, which is where the control files that let you build a package reside. It's not a big problem though; it's easy to get a packageable source tree:

Get the mainline kernel tree

git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git

Look at the latest mainline kernel (as of today http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.2-rc6-precise/). There are three patch files (0001-base-packaging.patch, 0002-debian-changelog.patch, 0003-default-configs.patch). Download these three files.

Change to your fresh new linux source directory and apply all 3 patches in order:

patch -p1 <0001-base-packaging.patch

patch -p1 <0002-debian-changelog.patch

patch -p1 <0003-default-configs.patch

You'll now have a nice debian/ directory with packaging information. Then you can apply the instructions in the two URLs I mention above to configure and build packages from your kernel. Hopefully this will also create a kernel-source package.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Kernel – Building a New Vanilla Kernel and Handling Produced Debs

Ubuntu – How to build the mainline kernel source package

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