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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Yes an UB sanitizer is probably unworkable in a kernel program

A kernel program is not that different from any other.

i think the problem would be the kernel would need to support the memory sanitizer. as long as your kernel module only touched memory allocated from its own functions then i guess in theory you could run a memory sanitizer without kernel support but your kernel module would be pretty useless. the problem is if the kernel gives you a buffer then how does the memory sanitizer that has no knowledge of the kernel know that the buffer is safe to read or write from. apparently windows does have support for kasan so vendor support should make it workable (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/01/26/introducing-kernel-sanitizers-on-microsoft-platforms/). though, i don't use windows so i don't know how well it works. also, i guess you could just have a userspace test harness but for something like this you probably need some kind of final test with the module running in the kernel.

In this case it is, with completely different rules about stdlib usage, memory allocation, what can and cannot be paged etc.