Magic Tricks To Get Out of Trouble With the Sysreq Key

Restore, Kill, Sync, and More

The SysReq key is hidden up the top right of your keyboard, and looks a bit like a relic from a former era of computing. (Which, indeed, it is.) But there's a bunch of things you can still do with it that may come in handy. Note that this is documented only on i386 on Linux, and you need your kernel to have been compiled with the "Magic SysRq Key" option. Find out if it has been by looking at /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq ��� if it exists and contains the value 1, all possible requests are allowed.

Press Alt-Sysreq, then one of the following letters:

r	Unraw: Restores the keyboard after an X crash or similar.
0	Changes console loglevel to 0 and so reduces error messages.
k	System attention key: Kills all processes on the current virtual console.
e	Terminate: Kills all processes except init on the current terminal.
i	Kill: Kills all processes except init, everywhere.
s	Sync: Attempts to sync all mounted filesystems. Outputs OK and Done when it's managed. This can reduce the chances of needing to run fsck at a later stage so it can be useful if you're having disk problems.
u	Umount: Attempts to remount all mounted filesystems read-only.
b	Reboot: immediately reboots the system without syncing or unmounting disks. Not a good idea unless in extremis! This may lead to data loss.
p	Dumps current registers and flags to the console.
m	Dumps current memory info to the console.

Related Articles �� The Penguin's Practical Network Troubleshooting Guide �� The Linux CLI for Beginners, or, Fear Not the Linux Command Line! �� Begone Caps Lock and Other Great Keyboard Hacks

If this doesn't work, check the documentation at /usr/share/doc/linux-doc-2.6.18/Documentation/sysrq.txt.gz for some suggestions (including checking the keycode being sent).

Article courtesy of ServerWatch.com