forked from luck/tmp_suning_uos_patched
e3118e8359
This work adds the DataCenter TCP (DCTCP) congestion control algorithm [1], which has been first published at SIGCOMM 2010 [2], resp. follow-up analysis at SIGMETRICS 2011 [3] (and also, more recently as an informational IETF draft available at [4]). DCTCP is an enhancement to the TCP congestion control algorithm for data center networks. Typical data center workloads are i.e. i) partition/aggregate (queries; bursty, delay sensitive), ii) short messages e.g. 50KB-1MB (for coordination and control state; delay sensitive), and iii) large flows e.g. 1MB-100MB (data update; throughput sensitive). DCTCP has therefore been designed for such environments to provide/achieve the following three requirements: * High burst tolerance (incast due to partition/aggregate) * Low latency (short flows, queries) * High throughput (continuous data updates, large file transfers) with commodity, shallow buffered switches The basic idea of its design consists of two fundamentals: i) on the switch side, packets are being marked when its internal queue length > threshold K (K is chosen so that a large enough headroom for marked traffic is still available in the switch queue); ii) the sender/host side maintains a moving average of the fraction of marked packets, so each RTT, F is being updated as follows: F := X / Y, where X is # of marked ACKs, Y is total # of ACKs alpha := (1 - g) * alpha + g * F, where g is a smoothing constant The resulting alpha (iow: probability that switch queue is congested) is then being used in order to adaptively decrease the congestion window W: W := (1 - (alpha / 2)) * W The means for receiving marked packets resp. marking them on switch side in DCTCP is the use of ECN. RFC3168 describes a mechanism for using Explicit Congestion Notification from the switch for early detection of congestion, rather than waiting for segment loss to occur. However, this method only detects the presence of congestion, not the *extent*. In the presence of mild congestion, it reduces the TCP congestion window too aggressively and unnecessarily affects the throughput of long flows [4]. DCTCP, as mentioned, enhances Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) processing to estimate the fraction of bytes that encounter congestion, rather than simply detecting that some congestion has occurred. DCTCP then scales the TCP congestion window based on this estimate [4], thus it can derive multibit feedback from the information present in the single-bit sequence of marks in its control law. And thus act in *proportion* to the extent of congestion, not its *presence*. Switches therefore set the Congestion Experienced (CE) codepoint in packets when internal queue lengths exceed threshold K. Resulting, DCTCP delivers the same or better throughput than normal TCP, while using 90% less buffer space. It was found in [2] that DCTCP enables the applications to handle 10x the current background traffic, without impacting foreground traffic. Moreover, a 10x increase in foreground traffic did not cause any timeouts, and thus largely eliminates TCP incast collapse problems. The algorithm itself has already seen deployments in large production data centers since then. We did a long-term stress-test and analysis in a data center, short summary of our TCP incast tests with iperf compared to cubic: This test measured DCTCP throughput and latency and compared it with CUBIC throughput and latency for an incast scenario. In this test, 19 senders sent at maximum rate to a single receiver. The receiver simply ran iperf -s. The senders ran iperf -c <receiver> -t 30. All senders started simultaneously (using local clocks synchronized by ntp). This test was repeated multiple times. Below shows the results from a single test. Other tests are similar. (DCTCP results were extremely consistent, CUBIC results show some variance induced by the TCP timeouts that CUBIC encountered.) For this test, we report statistics on the number of TCP timeouts, flow throughput, and traffic latency. 1) Timeouts (total over all flows, and per flow summaries): CUBIC DCTCP Total 3227 25 Mean 169.842 1.316 Median 183 1 Max 207 5 Min 123 0 Stddev 28.991 1.600 Timeout data is taken by measuring the net change in netstat -s "other TCP timeouts" reported. As a result, the timeout measurements above are not restricted to the test traffic, and we believe that it is likely that all of the "DCTCP timeouts" are actually timeouts for non-test traffic. We report them nevertheless. CUBIC will also include some non-test timeouts, but they are drawfed by bona fide test traffic timeouts for CUBIC. Clearly DCTCP does an excellent job of preventing TCP timeouts. DCTCP reduces timeouts by at least two orders of magnitude and may well have eliminated them in this scenario. 2) Throughput (per flow in Mbps): CUBIC DCTCP Mean 521.684 521.895 Median 464 523 Max 776 527 Min 403 519 Stddev 105.891 2.601 Fairness 0.962 0.999 Throughput data was simply the average throughput for each flow reported by iperf. By avoiding TCP timeouts, DCTCP is able to achieve much better per-flow results. In CUBIC, many flows experience TCP timeouts which makes flow throughput unpredictable and unfair. DCTCP, on the other hand, provides very clean predictable throughput without incurring TCP timeouts. Thus, the standard deviation of CUBIC throughput is dramatically higher than the standard deviation of DCTCP throughput. Mean throughput is nearly identical because even though cubic flows suffer TCP timeouts, other flows will step in and fill the unused bandwidth. Note that this test is something of a best case scenario for incast under CUBIC: it allows other flows to fill in for flows experiencing a timeout. Under situations where the receiver is issuing requests and then waiting for all flows to complete, flows cannot fill in for timed out flows and throughput will drop dramatically. 3) Latency (in ms): CUBIC DCTCP Mean 4.0088 0.04219 Median 4.055 0.0395 Max 4.2 0.085 Min 3.32 0.028 Stddev 0.1666 0.01064 Latency for each protocol was computed by running "ping -i 0.2 <receiver>" from a single sender to the receiver during the incast test. For DCTCP, "ping -Q 0x6 -i 0.2 <receiver>" was used to ensure that traffic traversed the DCTCP queue and was not dropped when the queue size was greater than the marking threshold. The summary statistics above are over all ping metrics measured between the single sender, receiver pair. The latency results for this test show a dramatic difference between CUBIC and DCTCP. CUBIC intentionally overflows the switch buffer which incurs the maximum queue latency (more buffer memory will lead to high latency.) DCTCP, on the other hand, deliberately attempts to keep queue occupancy low. The result is a two orders of magnitude reduction of latency with DCTCP - even with a switch with relatively little RAM. Switches with larger amounts of RAM will incur increasing amounts of latency for CUBIC, but not for DCTCP. 4) Convergence and stability test: This test measured the time that DCTCP took to fairly redistribute bandwidth when a new flow commences. It also measured DCTCP's ability to remain stable at a fair bandwidth distribution. DCTCP is compared with CUBIC for this test. At the commencement of this test, a single flow is sending at maximum rate (near 10 Gbps) to a single receiver. One second after that first flow commences, a new flow from a distinct server begins sending to the same receiver as the first flow. After the second flow has sent data for 10 seconds, the second flow is terminated. The first flow sends for an additional second. Ideally, the bandwidth would be evenly shared as soon as the second flow starts, and recover as soon as it stops. The results of this test are shown below. Note that the flow bandwidth for the two flows was measured near the same time, but not simultaneously. DCTCP performs nearly perfectly within the measurement limitations of this test: bandwidth is quickly distributed fairly between the two flows, remains stable throughout the duration of the test, and recovers quickly. CUBIC, in contrast, is slow to divide the bandwidth fairly, and has trouble remaining stable. CUBIC DCTCP Seconds Flow 1 Flow 2 Seconds Flow 1 Flow 2 0 9.93 0 0 9.92 0 0.5 9.87 0 0.5 9.86 0 1 8.73 2.25 1 6.46 4.88 1.5 7.29 2.8 1.5 4.9 4.99 2 6.96 3.1 2 4.92 4.94 2.5 6.67 3.34 2.5 4.93 5 3 6.39 3.57 3 4.92 4.99 3.5 6.24 3.75 3.5 4.94 4.74 4 6 3.94 4 5.34 4.71 4.5 5.88 4.09 4.5 4.99 4.97 5 5.27 4.98 5 4.83 5.01 5.5 4.93 5.04 5.5 4.89 4.99 6 4.9 4.99 6 4.92 5.04 6.5 4.93 5.1 6.5 4.91 4.97 7 4.28 5.8 7 4.97 4.97 7.5 4.62 4.91 7.5 4.99 4.82 8 5.05 4.45 8 5.16 4.76 8.5 5.93 4.09 8.5 4.94 4.98 9 5.73 4.2 9 4.92 5.02 9.5 5.62 4.32 9.5 4.87 5.03 10 6.12 3.2 10 4.91 5.01 10.5 6.91 3.11 10.5 4.87 5.04 11 8.48 0 11 8.49 4.94 11.5 9.87 0 11.5 9.9 0 SYN/ACK ECT test: This test demonstrates the importance of ECT on SYN and SYN-ACK packets by measuring the connection probability in the presence of competing flows for a DCTCP connection attempt *without* ECT in the SYN packet. The test was repeated five times for each number of competing flows. Competing Flows 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 16 ------------------------------ Mean Connection Probability 1 | 0.67 | 0.45 | 0.28 | 0 Median Connection Probability 1 | 0.65 | 0.45 | 0.25 | 0 As the number of competing flows moves beyond 1, the connection probability drops rapidly. Enabling DCTCP with this patch requires the following steps: DCTCP must be running both on the sender and receiver side in your data center, i.e.: sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=dctcp Also, ECN functionality must be enabled on all switches in your data center for DCTCP to work. The default ECN marking threshold (K) heuristic on the switch for DCTCP is e.g., 20 packets (30KB) at 1Gbps, and 65 packets (~100KB) at 10Gbps (K > 1/7 * C * RTT, [4]). In above tests, for each switch port, traffic was segregated into two queues. For any packet with a DSCP of 0x01 - or equivalently a TOS of 0x04 - the packet was placed into the DCTCP queue. All other packets were placed into the default drop-tail queue. For the DCTCP queue, RED/ECN marking was enabled, here, with a marking threshold of 75 KB. More details however, we refer you to the paper [2] under section 3). There are no code changes required to applications running in user space. DCTCP has been implemented in full *isolation* of the rest of the TCP code as its own congestion control module, so that it can run without a need to expose code to the core of the TCP stack, and thus nothing changes for non-DCTCP users. Changes in the CA framework code are minimal, and DCTCP algorithm operates on mechanisms that are already available in most Silicon. The gain (dctcp_shift_g) is currently a fixed constant (1/16) from the paper, but we leave the option that it can be chosen carefully to a different value by the user. In case DCTCP is being used and ECN support on peer site is off, DCTCP falls back after 3WHS to operate in normal TCP Reno mode. ss {-4,-6} -t -i diag interface: ... dctcp wscale:7,7 rto:203 rtt:2.349/0.026 mss:1448 cwnd:2054 ssthresh:1102 ce_state 0 alpha 15 ab_ecn 0 ab_tot 735584 send 10129.2Mbps pacing_rate 20254.1Mbps unacked:1822 retrans:0/15 reordering:101 rcv_space:29200 ... dctcp-reno wscale:7,7 rto:201 rtt:0.711/1.327 ato:40 mss:1448 cwnd:10 ssthresh:1102 fallback_mode send 162.9Mbps pacing_rate 325.5Mbps rcv_rtt:1.5 rcv_space:29200 More information about DCTCP can be found in [1-4]. [1] http://simula.stanford.edu/~alizade/Site/DCTCP.html [2] http://simula.stanford.edu/~alizade/Site/DCTCP_files/dctcp-final.pdf [3] http://simula.stanford.edu/~alizade/Site/DCTCP_files/dctcp_analysis-full.pdf [4] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bensley-tcpm-dctcp-00 Joint work with Florian Westphal and Glenn Judd. Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de> Signed-off-by: Glenn Judd <glenn.judd@morganstanley.com> Acked-by: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> |
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REPORTING-BUGS |
Linux kernel release 3.x <http://kernel.org/> These are the release notes for Linux version 3. Read them carefully, as they tell you what this is all about, explain how to install the kernel, and what to do if something goes wrong. WHAT IS LINUX? Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance. It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License - see the accompanying COPYING file for more details. ON WHAT HARDWARE DOES IT RUN? Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher), today Linux also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, Cell, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS, Xtensa, Tilera TILE, AVR32 and Renesas M32R architectures. Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although functionality is then obviously somewhat limited. Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML). DOCUMENTATION: - There is a lot of documentation available both in electronic form on the Internet and in books, both Linux-specific and pertaining to general UNIX questions. I'd recommend looking into the documentation subdirectories on any Linux FTP site for the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) books. This README is not meant to be documentation on the system: there are much better sources available. - There are various README files in the Documentation/ subdirectory: these typically contain kernel-specific installation notes for some drivers for example. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Changes file, as it contains information about the problems, which may result by upgrading your kernel. - The Documentation/DocBook/ subdirectory contains several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats: PostScript (.ps), PDF, HTML, & man-pages, among others. After installation, "make psdocs", "make pdfdocs", "make htmldocs", or "make mandocs" will render the documentation in the requested format. INSTALLING the kernel source: - If you install the full sources, put the kernel tarball in a directory where you have permissions (eg. your home directory) and unpack it: gzip -cd linux-3.X.tar.gz | tar xvf - or bzip2 -dc linux-3.X.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - Replace "X" with the version number of the latest kernel. Do NOT use the /usr/src/linux area! This area has a (usually incomplete) set of kernel headers that are used by the library header files. They should match the library, and not get messed up by whatever the kernel-du-jour happens to be. - You can also upgrade between 3.x releases by patching. Patches are distributed in the traditional gzip and the newer bzip2 format. To install by patching, get all the newer patch files, enter the top level directory of the kernel source (linux-3.X) and execute: gzip -cd ../patch-3.x.gz | patch -p1 or bzip2 -dc ../patch-3.x.bz2 | patch -p1 Replace "x" for all versions bigger than the version "X" of your current source tree, _in_order_, and you should be ok. You may want to remove the backup files (some-file-name~ or some-file-name.orig), and make sure that there are no failed patches (some-file-name# or some-file-name.rej). If there are, either you or I have made a mistake. Unlike patches for the 3.x kernels, patches for the 3.x.y kernels (also known as the -stable kernels) are not incremental but instead apply directly to the base 3.x kernel. For example, if your base kernel is 3.0 and you want to apply the 3.0.3 patch, you must not first apply the 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 patches. Similarly, if you are running kernel version 3.0.2 and want to jump to 3.0.3, you must first reverse the 3.0.2 patch (that is, patch -R) _before_ applying the 3.0.3 patch. You can read more on this in Documentation/applying-patches.txt Alternatively, the script patch-kernel can be used to automate this process. It determines the current kernel version and applies any patches found. linux/scripts/patch-kernel linux The first argument in the command above is the location of the kernel source. Patches are applied from the current directory, but an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument. - Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around: cd linux make mrproper You should now have the sources correctly installed. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS Compiling and running the 3.x kernels requires up-to-date versions of various software packages. Consult Documentation/Changes for the minimum version numbers required and how to get updates for these packages. Beware that using excessively old versions of these packages can cause indirect errors that are very difficult to track down, so don't assume that you can just update packages when obvious problems arise during build or operation. BUILD directory for the kernel: When compiling the kernel, all output files will per default be stored together with the kernel source code. Using the option "make O=output/dir" allow you to specify an alternate place for the output files (including .config). Example: kernel source code: /usr/src/linux-3.X build directory: /home/name/build/kernel To configure and build the kernel, use: cd /usr/src/linux-3.X make O=/home/name/build/kernel menuconfig make O=/home/name/build/kernel sudo make O=/home/name/build/kernel modules_install install Please note: If the 'O=output/dir' option is used, then it must be used for all invocations of make. CONFIGURING the kernel: Do not skip this step even if you are only upgrading one minor version. New configuration options are added in each release, and odd problems will turn up if the configuration files are not set up as expected. If you want to carry your existing configuration to a new version with minimal work, use "make oldconfig", which will only ask you for the answers to new questions. - Alternative configuration commands are: "make config" Plain text interface. "make menuconfig" Text based color menus, radiolists & dialogs. "make nconfig" Enhanced text based color menus. "make xconfig" X windows (Qt) based configuration tool. "make gconfig" X windows (Gtk) based configuration tool. "make oldconfig" Default all questions based on the contents of your existing ./.config file and asking about new config symbols. "make silentoldconfig" Like above, but avoids cluttering the screen with questions already answered. Additionally updates the dependencies. "make olddefconfig" Like above, but sets new symbols to their default values without prompting. "make defconfig" Create a ./.config file by using the default symbol values from either arch/$ARCH/defconfig or arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig, depending on the architecture. "make ${PLATFORM}_defconfig" Create a ./.config file by using the default symbol values from arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig. Use "make help" to get a list of all available platforms of your architecture. "make allyesconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to 'y' as much as possible. "make allmodconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to 'm' as much as possible. "make allnoconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to 'n' as much as possible. "make randconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to random values. "make localmodconfig" Create a config based on current config and loaded modules (lsmod). Disables any module option that is not needed for the loaded modules. To create a localmodconfig for another machine, store the lsmod of that machine into a file and pass it in as a LSMOD parameter. target$ lsmod > /tmp/mylsmod target$ scp /tmp/mylsmod host:/tmp host$ make LSMOD=/tmp/mylsmod localmodconfig The above also works when cross compiling. "make localyesconfig" Similar to localmodconfig, except it will convert all module options to built in (=y) options. You can find more information on using the Linux kernel config tools in Documentation/kbuild/kconfig.txt. - NOTES on "make config": - Having unnecessary drivers will make the kernel bigger, and can under some circumstances lead to problems: probing for a nonexistent controller card may confuse your other controllers - Compiling the kernel with "Processor type" set higher than 386 will result in a kernel that does NOT work on a 386. The kernel will detect this on bootup, and give up. - A kernel with math-emulation compiled in will still use the coprocessor if one is present: the math emulation will just never get used in that case. The kernel will be slightly larger, but will work on different machines regardless of whether they have a math coprocessor or not. - The "kernel hacking" configuration details usually result in a bigger or slower kernel (or both), and can even make the kernel less stable by configuring some routines to actively try to break bad code to find kernel problems (kmalloc()). Thus you should probably answer 'n' to the questions for "development", "experimental", or "debugging" features. COMPILING the kernel: - Make sure you have at least gcc 3.2 available. For more information, refer to Documentation/Changes. Please note that you can still run a.out user programs with this kernel. - Do a "make" to create a compressed kernel image. It is also possible to do "make install" if you have lilo installed to suit the kernel makefiles, but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first. To do the actual install, you have to be root, but none of the normal build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain. - If you configured any of the parts of the kernel as `modules', you will also have to do "make modules_install". - Verbose kernel compile/build output: Normally, the kernel build system runs in a fairly quiet mode (but not totally silent). However, sometimes you or other kernel developers need to see compile, link, or other commands exactly as they are executed. For this, use "verbose" build mode. This is done by inserting "V=1" in the "make" command. E.g.: make V=1 all To have the build system also tell the reason for the rebuild of each target, use "V=2". The default is "V=0". - Keep a backup kernel handy in case something goes wrong. This is especially true for the development releases, since each new release contains new code which has not been debugged. Make sure you keep a backup of the modules corresponding to that kernel, as well. If you are installing a new kernel with the same version number as your working kernel, make a backup of your modules directory before you do a "make modules_install". Alternatively, before compiling, use the kernel config option "LOCALVERSION" to append a unique suffix to the regular kernel version. LOCALVERSION can be set in the "General Setup" menu. - In order to boot your new kernel, you'll need to copy the kernel image (e.g. .../linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage after compilation) to the place where your regular bootable kernel is found. - Booting a kernel directly from a floppy without the assistance of a bootloader such as LILO, is no longer supported. If you boot Linux from the hard drive, chances are you use LILO, which uses the kernel image as specified in the file /etc/lilo.conf. The kernel image file is usually /vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz, /bzImage or /boot/bzImage. To use the new kernel, save a copy of the old image and copy the new image over the old one. Then, you MUST RERUN LILO to update the loading map!! If you don't, you won't be able to boot the new kernel image. Reinstalling LILO is usually a matter of running /sbin/lilo. You may wish to edit /etc/lilo.conf to specify an entry for your old kernel image (say, /vmlinux.old) in case the new one does not work. See the LILO docs for more information. After reinstalling LILO, you should be all set. Shutdown the system, reboot, and enjoy! If you ever need to change the default root device, video mode, ramdisk size, etc. in the kernel image, use the 'rdev' program (or alternatively the LILO boot options when appropriate). No need to recompile the kernel to change these parameters. - Reboot with the new kernel and enjoy. IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG: - If you have problems that seem to be due to kernel bugs, please check the file MAINTAINERS to see if there is a particular person associated with the part of the kernel that you are having trouble with. If there isn't anyone listed there, then the second best thing is to mail them to me (torvalds@linux-foundation.org), and possibly to any other relevant mailing-list or to the newsgroup. - In all bug-reports, *please* tell what kernel you are talking about, how to duplicate the problem, and what your setup is (use your common sense). If the problem is new, tell me so, and if the problem is old, please try to tell me when you first noticed it. - If the bug results in a message like unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000010 Oops: 0002 EIP: 0010:XXXXXXXX eax: xxxxxxxx ebx: xxxxxxxx ecx: xxxxxxxx edx: xxxxxxxx esi: xxxxxxxx edi: xxxxxxxx ebp: xxxxxxxx ds: xxxx es: xxxx fs: xxxx gs: xxxx Pid: xx, process nr: xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx or similar kernel debugging information on your screen or in your system log, please duplicate it *exactly*. The dump may look incomprehensible to you, but it does contain information that may help debugging the problem. The text above the dump is also important: it tells something about why the kernel dumped code (in the above example, it's due to a bad kernel pointer). More information on making sense of the dump is in Documentation/oops-tracing.txt - If you compiled the kernel with CONFIG_KALLSYMS you can send the dump as is, otherwise you will have to use the "ksymoops" program to make sense of the dump (but compiling with CONFIG_KALLSYMS is usually preferred). This utility can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.<country>.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/ksymoops/ . Alternatively, you can do the dump lookup by hand: - In debugging dumps like the above, it helps enormously if you can look up what the EIP value means. The hex value as such doesn't help me or anybody else very much: it will depend on your particular kernel setup. What you should do is take the hex value from the EIP line (ignore the "0010:"), and look it up in the kernel namelist to see which kernel function contains the offending address. To find out the kernel function name, you'll need to find the system binary associated with the kernel that exhibited the symptom. This is the file 'linux/vmlinux'. To extract the namelist and match it against the EIP from the kernel crash, do: nm vmlinux | sort | less This will give you a list of kernel addresses sorted in ascending order, from which it is simple to find the function that contains the offending address. Note that the address given by the kernel debugging messages will not necessarily match exactly with the function addresses (in fact, that is very unlikely), so you can't just 'grep' the list: the list will, however, give you the starting point of each kernel function, so by looking for the function that has a starting address lower than the one you are searching for but is followed by a function with a higher address you will find the one you want. In fact, it may be a good idea to include a bit of "context" in your problem report, giving a few lines around the interesting one. If you for some reason cannot do the above (you have a pre-compiled kernel image or similar), telling me as much about your setup as possible will help. Please read the REPORTING-BUGS document for details. - Alternatively, you can use gdb on a running kernel. (read-only; i.e. you cannot change values or set break points.) To do this, first compile the kernel with -g; edit arch/i386/Makefile appropriately, then do a "make clean". You'll also need to enable CONFIG_PROC_FS (via "make config"). After you've rebooted with the new kernel, do "gdb vmlinux /proc/kcore". You can now use all the usual gdb commands. The command to look up the point where your system crashed is "l *0xXXXXXXXX". (Replace the XXXes with the EIP value.) gdb'ing a non-running kernel currently fails because gdb (wrongly) disregards the starting offset for which the kernel is compiled.