Chapter 5: Debugging Kernel Memory Issues – Part 1

There's no doubt about it, C (and C++) is a really powerful programming language, one that allows the developer to straddle both high-level layered abstractions (after all, object-oriented languages such as Java and Python are written in C) as well as to work upon the bare metal, as it were. This is fantastic. Of course, there's a price to pay: the compiler will do only so much. You want to overflow a memory buffer? Go ahead, it doesn't care. Want to peek at or poke an unmapped memory region? No problem.

Well, no problem for the compiler, but big problems for us! This is nothing new really. We mentioned just this in Chapter 2, Approaches to Kernel Debugging. C being a procedural and non-managed programming language (in memory terms), it's ultimately the programmer's responsibility to ensure that runtime memory usage is correct and well behaved.

The Linux kernel is almost entirely written in C ...