Proposed alternative plan: let's add a new symbol, something likeSure, that sounds fine to me. Sinan can you take care of that for v4?
DEBUG_MISC ("Miscellaneous debug code that should be under a more
specific debug option but isn't"), make it depend on DEBUG_KERNEL and be
"default DEBUG_KERNEL" but allow itself to be turned off, and then
mechanically change the small handful of "#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL" to
"#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_MISC".
Does that sound like an appropriately rapid solution for this bug?