With the release of Linux kernel version 6.1, users will have a new tool at their disposal for detecting malfunctioning CPUs.
When a segmentation failure occurs, the new functionality will print the socket and core that are likely responsible; this should help users determine if a specific CPU or core is consistently producing issues.
Linux fans at home won’t care much, but sysadmins managing multiple Linux systems will.
Explain how The Function Is Used?
The new functionality is enabled by appending “print()” to the “show signal msg()” function, which prints the CPU, core, and socket information at the time of the segfault.
For additional details on how to manipulate this particular print, please go to the official documentation(opens in a new tab).
The functionality “is not perfect,” since “the task might get rescheduled on another CPU between when the problem happened, and when the notice is printed,” write Kernal documentation writers Rik van Riel and Borislav Petkov.
“in practice, this has been good enough to enable folks to discover multiple faulty CPU cores,” they conceded.
Most developers who are using their Linux distribution for resource-intensive tasks are not likely to use this functionality on its own. Prime95 and Aida64 are two well-known CPU stress testing tools that you should use.
As part of Linux 6.1’s merging window in October, the update will become available. Even though it’s been a while since the last Linux upgrade, 6.0, testing of that version has finally begun.
Linus Torvalds may have said, “there’s nothing fundamentally changed about” version 6.0, but the update included a lot of new features and improvements.
