Building a comfortable workflow for debugging an old version of the Linux kernel (opens in new tab)

When you want to work on the Linux kernel, for example to see how an exploit acts (like Dirty COW on kernel 4.7), you need to build a comfortable working environment. I use: Docker for compiling sources in their original version (with the GCC/LD versions corresponding to the source era). QEMU for running the executables in a virtual machine. VS Code as a debugger. Through this article, I will show you how I configured my environment to achieve an efficient setup. 1) Compiling source code The ...