How to make Linux automatically reboot after a kernel panic?

After a kernel panic, it is impossible to remotely connect to the Linux server to reboot it by SSH. How to make the panic kernel automatically reboot itself?

Linux kernel has a nice feature that reboots itself after a timeout when a kernel panic happened.

Usually, it is disabled by default. To turn it on, you can set the kernel.panic kernel parameter.

For a running system:

# echo 20 >/proc/sys/kernel/panic

Here, 20 is the number of seconds before the kernel reboots. 0 means the feature is disabled.

To make the configuration persistent, you have 2 choices:

  1. add the kernel parameter panic=20 to your bootloader (grub or grub2).

  2. add kernel.panic = 20 to /etc/sysctl.conf .

After you enabled the auto reboot after kernel panic, you may need to check the uptime and logs or create a @reboot cron jobs to send emails or use some other mechanisms to know that there was a auto reboot caused by a kernel panic.

Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

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