[hugatest]

If your unit test needs root privileges, then it's not really a unit test in all but very few exceptional cases. It means you are interacting with the actually running kernel, which means you are integration testing, not unit testing.

[tptacek]

Who cares?

[hugatest]

Those who think they are unit testing but are actually integration testing.

This is not just about terminology. If you don't have actual unit tests then your testing is much more complicated and heavyweight than it needs to be with costly consequences for maintaining your software. You can run thousands of unit tests in a second if you just run some functions and verify their output. If you need to set up some hardness to interact with the kernel, virtualizing and mocking tons of facilities around it, then your testing speed goes down by orders of magnitude.