[first_amendment]

If that's what Linux does, that seems fully intentional and the possible consequences on kernel state are probably well-thought out. Are you claiming what Linux does normally is unsafe and could possibly corrupt kernel state? Like every EFAULT? If that's not your claim, then the analogy doesn't hold and you're entirely missing my point.

[geofft]

That is absolutely my claim, and I am absolutely claiming that it is not well-thought-out - it's literally doing this in response to any fault from kernelspace. If you were unlucky enough that the wild pointer referred to someone else's memory, well, sucks to be you, some random process on your system (or random file on disk, or whatever) has memory corruption and nobody even knew.