Building your kernel and modules with Clang

Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is the original name given to this modular compiler tooling project. It now doesn't have much to do with traditional virtual machines and is instead a powerful backend for several compilers and toolchains.

Clang (the pronunciation rhymes with "slang") is a modern compiler frontend technology for C-type languages (includes support for C, C++, CUDA, Objective C/C++, and more) and is based on the LLVM compiler. It's considered a drop-in replacement for GCC. Clang currently seems to have a significant advantage over GCC – especially from our point of view – generating superior diagnostics as well as being able to intelligently generate code avoiding OOB accesses. This is critical. It paves the way to superior code. We saw (in the previous section on KASAN) that faulty left-OOB accesses on global memory, not reliably caught by GCC (versions 9.3, 10, and 11), are caught with...