Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] ring-buffer: Flush and stop persistent ring buffer on panic

From: Steven Rostedt

Date: Fri Feb 20 2026 - 14:54:22 EST


On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:14:28 +0900
"Masami Hiramatsu (Google)" <mhiramat@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Masami Hiramatsu (Google) <mhiramat@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> On a real hardware, since panic and reboot the machine will not
> flush hardware cache to the persistent ring buffer, the events
> written right before the panic can be lost. Moreover, since
> there will be an inconsistency between the commit counter (which
> is written atomically via local_set()) and the data, validation
> will fail and all data in the persistent ring buffer will be lost.

Here's a bit of a fix up on the text:

On real hardware, panic and machine reboot may not flush hardware cache
to memory. This means the persistent ring buffer, which relies on a
coherent state of memory, may not have its events written to the buffer
and they may be lost. Moreover, there may be inconsistency with the
counters which are used for validation of the integrity of the
persistent ring buffer which may cause all data to be discarded.


>
> To avoid this issue, this will stop recording on the ring buffer
> and flush cache at the reserved memory on panic.

To avoid this issue, stop recording of the ring buffer on panic and
flush the cache of the ring buffer's memory.


-- Steve