I wasn't saying you can't debug the kernel. I was saying that for practical purposes, debugging the kernel is needlessly hard. As one example, say you are run

I wasn't saying you can't debug the kernel. I was saying that for practical purposes, debugging the kernel is needlessly hard. As one example, say you are running the current ubuntu. A kernel panic will give you a bunch of hex addresses. How do you get a symbol'd backtrace of the kernel panic? (if you can't get that easily, running kgdb won't let you do symbolic debugging either)