It's not and actually I do find it kind of amusing that Linux is possibly the hardest of the three main OSes to get a debugging set up for, but yeah I've had to do it enough that I don't mind doing and I can probably get it set up in a few minutes. Plus if the bug isn't in some architecture specific or hardware dependent thing there's this Linux compatibility userspace layer I help out on sometimes that is much easier to work with. And if it's that easy, I will generally choose to that instead of having to actually think about what I am doing ;)

I think you can do it with qemu and gdb.

Unless the other os and debugger mentioned has an easy way to do it with a machine that's not virtualized?

So I'm no kernel dev and only did a web search out of curiosity... Based on https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/debugging/gdb... and https://sergioprado.blog/debugging-the-linux-kernel-with-gdb... , it reads as if it's fairly easy so long as you're willing to compile the kernel yourself. Actually, at that point I would personally favor UML, since at that point Linux is just a normal userspace program that you can attach to: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/virt/uml/user_mode_li...

But I'm not a kernel dev and it's been a very long time since I would have needed to debug the kernel; does this not actually work?

> It’s a terrible shame Linux is still a 1970s program.

This is a needlessly snide and inaccurate characterization.

> Plan 9’s debugger Acid can attach to a running kernel on a remote machine and debug it.

KGDB over Ethernet does the same on Linux.