I reflexively downvoted you. There has to be room for the evolution of operating systems and the maturation of new systems developers. this division of code into 'things we're allowed to understand' and 'the magic that we can't touch' has really been counterproductive for everyone.

but I realized that in the past decade or so all of my kernel experiments are being done in little baby kernels. virtualization and the sheer volume of open source makes this a perfectly good path. and frankly Linux isn't that lovely to work in and extend.

the current situation with kernel modules and symbol resolution is a crappy boundary that really gets in your way as a developer, and from a security perspective is really just crime scene tape.

so we should really try to clean up and harden production systems, and understand that we will need the playground to inform that activity. right now we have neither, and this clearly belongs in the playground.