Whenever I do kernel stuff, it happens in a VM, limited to a subset of the cores available on the machine. That way when I inevitably bork something, I can just

Whenever I do kernel stuff, it happens in a VM, limited to a subset of the cores available on the machine. That way when I inevitably bork something, I can just forcibly stop it. Another trick I've used is making as much of my core logic as possible happen in functions that are called from the kernel hooks, rather than in the kernel hooks. Then you can test a ton of it in userland to handle basic logic and flow control bugs, finally porting the code to the module. To help with this, it sometimes is actually faster to copy some of the kernel routines you use to a different .c file and change things like kprintf and kmalloc for the userland versions. It isn't going to be a perfect port, but it helps get some of the complex stuff out of the way where you have your familiar userland tools. All that said - I've only dabbled in the kernel a little, there are probably better ways that someone can chime in on.