For my work on proxy-exec, I’ve built up a collection of tests that I use to try to strain things and uncover issues. I’m sure there are lots of better ways, however I am but a simple caveman. Folks have asked about my process so I figured I'd try to document it. I’m likely forgetting things, but I’ll try to update as I think of them.

(I'll usually keep a custom test defconfig in my kerenl trees that have the options I see as useful/helpful enabled so others can re-create the same config easily):

CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING

Perfetto is super useful for understanding interactions between the kernel and applications. Outside of Android and ChromeOS, though it's use isn't as common. This doc tries to provide a basic walk through to get started using perfetto for upstream kernel development with classic linux distros, potentially running under qemu.

Grab the latest linux- tarball: https://github.com/google/perfetto/releases

Often the tests I’m tracing need to run as root, so because of this, I copied the binaries in the tarball to /usr/local/bin/ and chmod +x the binaries to make