Crash your Solaris 2 system

We'll start by crashing a Solaris 2 system. Is savecore ready? Okay, then, let's panic your system!

Example 5-1 How to crash a Solaris 2 system

 Hiya...  su  Password:  #  adb -k -w /dev/ksyms /dev/mem  physmem 1e05  rootdir/X  rootdir:  rootdir:        fc109408  rootdir/W 0  rootdir:        0xfc109408      =       0x0  $q  # 

How does this procedure crash your system? Solaris keeps track of the address of the root vnode structure in a symbol called rootdir . If this vnode pointer is zero, the next time the system tries to do anything that would require walking down a directory path , it will fall over trying to read location zero looking for the root directory's vnode . Reading memory location zero is an illegal operation which results in a bad trap, data fault.

Using adb we will write a zero into rootdir and the system will quickly panic.

If your system doesn't panic immediately, just use the UNIX ls command to get a directory listing of the root directory, / . That will surely do the trick!