How to bisect the kernel

[skandalfo]

Hi. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask.

 

I was basically running my Radxa Rock 5 ITX home server on Armbian, on the edge upstream kernel for a long time. 

 

Somewhere during the 6.19 release candidate kernel series an instability arised, where the machine would hard lock "at random", so I switched to the current kernel since, which to this day remains on unaffected 6.18.

 

But from time to time I try with edge again, and the instability is still present with the 7.1 upstream kernels. Moreover, with the load the machine has I can consistently trigger the lock up just by ssh-ing into the machine once it's been up for 10 minutes or so. I've since enabled the HW watchdog timer, which helps a bit mitigate the frustration here... 

 

I guess at some point current will move past 6.19, and I really would like to have the improved hardware support for newer kernels anyway. 

 

I would like to be able to bisect the kernel sources to find out where things broke down. I think I understand enough of the build system to generate edge kernel packages, but I don't know how to do so while bisecting the upstream kernel sources. I also couldn't find documentation about how to trigger the build system to build the kernel at a particular commit.

 

Is there any particular guidance on how to go with this? 

 

Thanks.

[Werner]

2 hours ago, skandalfo said:

6.19

Oh well, that's quite some time ago. The patchset used back then has been removed/renamed already to move on.

Look at 6df6d0d607abfd59169a0ef2fddbed5fcd5b58f9

 

The question is has this introduced upstream or with one of the patches Armbian puts on top. Quite a journey to dig through that.