v3 does not have any mechanism to detect NULL pointers used by accident.
I propose to fill the zero page (0x0-0xfff) with a special POISON_BYTE, maybe 0x6b. Furthermore, I'd like to make sure passing a NULL pointer (or something near it) to as a string to printk will be very visible in the logs. *(char *)0 = "ERROR NULL POINTER DEREFERENCE!\n"; The C statement above would cause a nice print everytime someone referenced the first 32 bytes in %s.
Another way to do this is extending the non-NULL check in printk to cover the whole zero page.
Regards, Carl-Daniel