In doing some robustness testing, I needed to crash my Linux VM intentionally to see if the rest of the system survived. I was thinking of writing a kernel module that just did something silly like dereference null or divide by zero, but turns out you can do it much easier than that. Just call panic.

panic.c:
#define __NO_VERSION__
#include <linux/version.h>
#include 
#include 

int init_module(void)
{
    panic(" insert lame excuse here");
    return 0;
}

Build with:

 gcc -I/usr/src/linux/include -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE -o panic.o -c panic.c

Here’s a good link about building kernel modules without full kernel source.

Now, run the following insmod, and your system will kernel panic.

 insmod panic.o 

Credit to Paul’s Journal