Only in grad school...

Last night, the research group and I were up all night working on a paper. I was modifying some benchmarks to collect another kind of data, and I got to a point where the code didn't work, and I had no idea how to fix it.

The code boiled down to something like this:

int x = 0;

int f()
{
...
x++;
}


int main()
{
...
f();
...
printf("%d\n",x);
...
}

But every time, it would print out zero. I asked one of the other grad students, and after a few perplexed moments, he came up with the solution:

"Oh, Nick! You forgot that we loaded the kernel module which drastically changes the semantics of memory."

Ah... gradschool.