"Is anyone testing the kgdb code in here?" Andrew Morton asked in his release announcement for the 2.6.23-rc1-mm2 patchset. Mike Frysinger asked, "does kgdb actually have a chance to get merged? With the history of it, i just assumed it was never going in". In the past, Linus Torvalds has resisted merging kernel debuggers and famously said, "I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will," going on to explain why he didn't want it to be too easy to hack the Linux kernel. An earlier push to get kgdb merged in 2004 didn't succeed, though some architectures already have versions of the debugger. The current kgdb patchset in Andrew's tree includes code for the i386, x86_64, ppc, mips, sh and arm architectures.

Andrew replied to Mike's question, "I was hoping for a 2.6.24 merge. But I haven't actually looked at it yet. Hopefully Jason is planning to get it all out for review soonish." He went on to add, "runtime testing isn't actually the most important thing at this time - if is doesn't work, well hey, we fix it, easy - we always have bugs. The main emphasis right now should be on higher-level design/review/integration stuff." Jason Wessel noted, "the KGDB tree is broken up into incremental units each layer adding more functionality and or arch specific pieces."