Asmttpd: Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly (2017)

Re:Asmttpd: Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly (... by PeCaN on Friday July 13, 2018 @06:19PM (#17527355)

Itanium does this automatically. You declare what registers you're using in the the function prologue and it handles popping/pushing/renaming. No register window exceptions too.

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Re:Asmttpd: Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly (... by TomMarius on Friday July 13, 2018 @11:25PM (#17528635)

Isn't Itanium obsolete? I'd love to learn otherwise.

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Re:Asmttpd: Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly (... by PeCaN on Saturday July 14, 2018 @12:29AM (#17528826)

Sadly it's dead now. In a cruel twist of fate, Intel killed it off shortly before we found out about all the speculative execution attacks and found that everything else is horrifically vulnerable.

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Re:Asmttpd: Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly (... by TomMarius on Saturday July 14, 2018 @06:19AM (#17529699)

Do you mean that Itanium would have been safe?

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Re:Asmttpd: Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly (... by PeCaN on Saturday July 14, 2018 @11:57AM (#17530817)

It's inherently not vulnerable to the Spectre/Meltdown family of attacks. They rely on speculative, out-of-order execution on modern CPUs, but Itanium is an in-order core with very limited (and software-controlled) speculation.

It's actually not vulnerable to a bunch of other attacks as well (e.g. a buffer overflow cannot overwrite the return address on Itanium).

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