The Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN) KCSAN is a dynamic race detector, which relies on compile-time instrumentation, and uses a watchpoint-based sampling approach to detect races. The feature was under development for quite some time and has already found legitimate bugs. Unfortunately it comes with a limitation, which was only understood late in the development cycle: It requires an up to date CLANG-11 compiler CLANG-11 is not yet released (scheduled for June), but it's the only compiler today which handles the kernel requirements and especially the annotations of functions to exclude them from KCSAN instrumentation correctly. These annotations really need to work so that low level entry code and especially int3 text poke handling can be completely isolated. A detailed discussion of the requirements and compiler issues can be found here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CANpmjNMTsY_8241bS7=XAfqvZHFLrVEkv_uM4aDUWE_kh3Rvbw@mail.gmail.com/ We came to the conclusion that trying to work around compiler limitations and bugs again would end up in a major trainwreck, so requiring a working compiler seemed to be the best choice. For Continous Integration purposes the compiler restriction is manageable and that's where most xxSAN reports come from. For a change this limitation might make GCC people actually look at their bugs. Some issues with CSAN in GCC are 7 years old and one has been 'fixed' 3 years ago with a half baken solution which 'solved' the reported issue but not the underlying problem. The KCSAN developers also ponder to use a GCC plugin to become independent, but that's not something which will show up in a few days. Blocking KCSAN until wide spread compiler support is available is not a really good alternative because the continuous growth of lockless optimizations in the kernel demands proper tooling support.