[darylteo]

Very easily hidden. Something obtuse like

    (.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)|(.+)

or even this

    (.{4})(.{7})(.{3})(.{6})(.{9})(.{4})(.{7})(.{3})(.{6})(.{9})(.{4})(.{7})(.{3})(.{6})(.{9})(.{4})(.{7})(.{3})(.{6})(.{9})(.{1})

would simply fail to match.

And I wouldn't necessarily blame the developer in either scenario - they received a card that says "hey the channel file will now have an extra field in it's schema"... noone said "btw it's optional".

Calling it a "first year programming mistake" like I'm reading in some media is somewhat incendiary. I see unmarshalling errors happen all the time.

The forest that we must not miss is the kernel-level driver simply dies with no error recovery and bricks the system.

[studmuffin650]

I think that’s just the nature of kernel programming. Once you’re running in kernel space, there are essentially no safety guards, which is why kernel programming is so difficult. Any faults that occur in user space causing a seg fault + core dump do not exist in kernel space. Especially since kernel code generally has to be written in C, it can be quite difficult even for the best engineers to get everything right.