alambert

The beginner wants to disable optimizations, so he can better understand the kernel behavior by stepping through it in a debugger; he's told this isn't possible. Compare this with the availability of checked builds of Windows components, which support debugging by disabling optimizations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...

PF_KEYv2's difficult interface definitely isn't a Linux issue. But PF_KEYv2's limited error reporting means that understanding what's going wrong requires kernel debugging. The difficulty of kernel debugging is a Linux issue. ("I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug.")

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953644

I agree! For Windows, getting symbols was trivial: you just pointed your debugger to the publicly-available symbol server[1]. You can see this attitude continuing in [2]: a beginner is warned away from using a debugger to understand the kernel behavior.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee4... [2] https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/2016...