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Alt-SysRq-E kills init

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 376 / 2 Years ago, mon, march 14, 2022, 1:55:36

NOTE: Yes, I have a QWERTY keyboard. I also fully enabled SysRq with echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq while root earlier.

Tonight my laptop froze up while having Chromium and Minecraft open. After a while of waiting the system wouldn't respond again so I switched to tty1 (very slowly) and performed the safe reboot sequence (Alt-SysRq-REISUB). When I got to E, text began to fly on my monitor. After that my keyboard's CapsLock and ScrollLock indicators began to blink endlessly. The text on my monitor was about:

The top was the end of a traceback for a ext3 I/O function

Middle was full of errors concerning writing to somewhere on the disk, also errors about a bad superblock (!)

Last line was Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! (exitcode: 0x00000007)

When I rebooted I think fsck fixed the filesystem up (I guess Minecraft was in the middle of a save). My question is: why did Alt-SysRq-E kill init when it shouldn't?

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unsmmoth

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4 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago mouedi · Accepted Answer

Alt+SysRq+E won't kill init.

That kernel panic is more likely was caused by that freeze which you experienced. When you issued the terminate all command with the magic combo, the kernel sent the SIGTERM signal to that misbehaving process which was causing your freeze, and because that was a misbehaving one, it decided to not die in the way a gentleman or a samurai should die when their death is needed, but instead it tried to handle that signal before dying and do something before its death. While it was handling that signal it caused some more problem to your already instable (freezing) system and that caused a kernel panic. (So the Alt+SysRq+E triggered that panic, but it wasn't the faulty for init's death. _{Or something similar to this happened, maybe with less drama.}