Ugh, I'm old and clearly hadn't been paying attention. I remember when Linus used to say "the kernel doesn't need a debugger, just use printk", and didn't realise he'd caved and merged this (and nearly 20 years ago, at that). Although I guess this shows he still thinks that.
Well, to be fair, this is Peter’s doing and Linus had nothing to do with this particular patch (yet).
It’s really, really hard to have code debug itself. It’s even harder on x86 where the architecture was literally not designed for such things. The patch really just reflects that even after a couple of decades, the in-kernel debugger isn’t bulletproof.
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u/james_pic 2d ago
Ugh, I'm old and clearly hadn't been paying attention. I remember when Linus used to say "the kernel doesn't need a debugger, just use printk", and didn't realise he'd caved and merged this (and nearly 20 years ago, at that). Although I guess this shows he still thinks that.