Oren Laadan's Top 10 Programming Mistakes Made By COMS W4118 Students

1. Incorrect syscall prototypes: (use: "asmlinkage long", "__user")
2. Missing validation of syscall arguments
3. Incorrect error reporting (use: "return -EINVAL;")
   
4. Incorrect/incomplete error path (e.g., no cleanup, memory leaks)
   
5. Sleeping while holding a spinlock (e.g., semaphore, memory alloc)
   
6. Access to volatile pointers w/o a lock and w/o holding a reference
   
7. Access to static/global variables without locking
   
8. Missing test for success of operations (or of proper setup)
   
9. Emitting debug messages or other unnecessary messages
   
10. Using C++ code constructs (when told to use "C")